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POEMS 



SHELLEY 



SELECTED AND ARRANGED 

BY 

STOPFORD A. BROOKE 



NEW YORK: 46 East 14TH Street 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

BOSTON: 100 Purchase Street 



TWinr. 






Copyright, 

1893, 

By T. Y. CROWELL & COc 



TRANSPHB 
A O. PUBLIC LIB&ABY 
BSIPT. 10. It 






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* I. 

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, 
And did he stop and speak to you, 
And did you speak to him again? 
-^ How strange it seems, and new! 

?i ' But you were living before that, 

9 -^ And also you are living after; 

' And the memory I started at — 

^ My starting moves your laughter! 

P , III. 

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own. 

And a certain use in the world, no doubt. 
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone 
/ "*= 'Mid the blank miles round about: 



IV. , 

For there I picked up on the heather, 
And TrtER?:''! •pVt inside my breast* .' 

A MOULTED feather, ^iW^ .EAGLE FEATHER! 

Well, I forget the rest." 

Robert Browning. 



f 



PREFACE. 



Shelley, from whose poetry this book of Selec- 
tions is made, can only, like all other poets, be 
judged justly, or fitly loved, when everything he 
wished to be published has been carefully studied. 
We can no more comprehend him in the right way 
by reading only his finest poems, .supposing we 
could choose them, than we can receive a true im- 
pression of the character of the scenery of a country 
by visiting a selection of its most beautiful places. 
Through his weakness we know part of his strength ; 
nor is it only for his power we love him. This neces- 
sity of reading all a poet's work, if we wish to know 
him truly, or to receive from him his special gift of 
pleasure, is the main objection to Selections ; but its 
weight is lessened when the intention of a book of 
this kind is not to represent Shelley fully, but to pre- 
sent, in a brief compass, enough of his poetry to 
induce those who are ignorant of it to read the whole. 
That is the only valid reason and excuse for Selec- 
tions from a poet, and it is the object of this book. 
If the excuse be accepted, we may say that Shelley 
is more open to selection than many of the other 
poets. His whole work is short, and a great deal of 
it can be included in a small book. It is especially 
lyrical, and lyrics are the best material for selections. 



vi PREFACE. 

Some, too, of the longer poems, such as Alastor and 
Adonais, in which we can study his steadier and more 
ambitious effort, are brief enough to be inserted entire, 
and they break the lyrics pleasantly, and offer a more 
varied enjoyment to the reader. There is also one 
spirit in Shelley's work which fills and brings into 
unity all his poems. It is the spirit of youth. We 
are not troubled in reading these Selections, by 
such a change in the whole nature of the poet as 
age made in Wordsworth. Owing to this unity of 
spirit, I have been able to place together,, without 
fear of their jarring with one another, poems written 
at different periods of Shelley's life on the same or 
kindred themes. To group such poems together is 
the method followed in this book, and its fitness 
seems to be supported by the fact that Shelley, being 
very fond of his ideas, and also of the forms he gave 
them, repeated them continually. The impression 
made by one poem is therefore strengthened by 
another on the same subject. Shelley is his own 
best illustrator. 

When Selections from any poet appear rapidly, it 
may be said that he has taken his place, that time 
and its verdict have distinguished him in his own 
country. And Shelley is now at home with us, and 
his praise becomes greater day by day. Some of 
that praise, especially when it exalts him, without 
distinctiveness of criticism, above his brother poets, 
seems undeserved, but there is no longer any doubt, 
among those worthy to judge, that Shelley has as- 
sumed his own separate throne among the greater 
poets of England. 



PREFACE. vii 

It is then somewhat strange to look back nearly 
sixty years, and to think that when Shelley died, 
scarcely fifty people cared to read his poetry, and 
even these did not understand it. Seven years after 
his death opinion began to change. He had so far 
influenced the young men of Cambridge, that its 
Union sent a deputation in November 1829 to the 
Oxford Union, to maintain Shelley's superiority over 
Byron. ''At that time,''' said Lord Houghton — 
speaking in 1866 — "■ we, the Cambridge undergrad- 
uates, were all very full of Mr. Shelley. We had 
printed his Adojiais in 1829 for the first time in 
England, and a friend of ours suggested that, as he 
had been expelled from Oxford, and very badly 
treated in that University, it would be a grand 
thing for us to defend him there.'" The young 
men, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes, and Sun- 
derland, were received by Gladstone, Francis Doyle, 
and Milnes Gaskell. Wilberforce of Oriel was in 
the Chair. Sir Francis Doyle (Christ Church) 
moved that Shelley was a greater poet than Lord 
Byron. He was supported by the three Cambridge 
men, and by Mr. Oldham of Oriel. The negative 
was defended by Mr. Manning; and on a division 
Byron was declared the greater poet by a majority 
of fifty-seven. This interesting story proves that 
some young men at Oxford and Cambridge were 
now awakened to Shelley's genius. They felt and 
loved him as the most ideal of the poets, and year 
by year he has increased the number of those who 
give him that special place and honor. 

About 1832 his power over the minds of men 



viii PREFACE. 

increased. At that time fresh poHtical and theo- 
logical elements began to excite England, and then 
the other side of Shelley's work began to tell. The 
poems he had written as the prophet of liberty, equal- 
ity, fraternity, and a Golden Age, were eagerly read 
by the more intelligent among the working classes, 
and by many who felt that the ideas of the French 
Revolution were again arising into activity after their 
winter sleep. It is a part of his work which still 
continues to do good. 

Again, within the last few years, the sad, regretful, 
unsatisfied, self-considering, indefinite elements in 
the mind of educated English society have found 
food and expression in a certain number of Shelley\s 
poems, and this has increased the extent of his influ- 
ence. That which has been called the " lyrical cry" 
belongs now to a whole section of society, and Shel- 
ley often echoes its regret and indefiniteness with 
great beauty. 

Moreover, a great number of persons who care for 
Nature as Art cares for her, that is, as alive and not 
dead, being revolted by the materialistic aspect in 
which some scientific theories now present her, have 
turned with new pleasure to the spiritual representa- 
tions given of her by such poets as Wordsworth and 
Shelley. That also has added a fresh impulse to the 
study of Shelley. 

It may also be said that the forms, and especially 
the ideal forms of passionate love, have been, of late, 
more minutely dwelt on in poetry, and with greater 
curiosity, than they have been since the Elizabethan 
period. It is natural, then, that a poet like Shelley, 



PREFACE. ix 

who made ideal love his study, and the subject of so 
much of his work, should now receive and claim 
greater attention. 

Shelley, reflecting and embodying these various 
phases, is then a much more comprehensive poet 
than the common judgment supposes. And he is 
all the more comprehensive because his nature and 
his work were twofold. The first thing to say of 
him is, that he lived in two worlds, thought in two 
worlds, and in both of these did work which was at 
once varied and distinct. One was the world of 
Mankind and its hopes, the other was the world of 
his own heart. 

His poetic life was an alternate changing from 
one of these worlds to the other. He passed from 
poetry written for the sake -of mankind, to poetry 
written for his own sake and to express himself; 
from the Shelley who was inspired by moral aims 
and wrote in the hope of a regeneration of the 
world, to that other Shelley who, inspired only by his 
own ideas and regrets, wrote without any ethical end, 
and absolutely apart from humanity. The passion- 
ate lover of man crosses over the stage, singing of 
mankind, and disappears. The passionate poet 
succeeds, singing of himself, and disappears in turn. 
The interchange continues, but both the figures are 
the same man. 

Shelley began as the prophet of the ideas of the 
French Revolution. Qiieen Mab, written with the 
enthusiasm of a youth for the overthrow of the evils 
that he thought oppressed mankind, and in hope of 
its deliverance into a world of love and peace, is not, 



X PREFACE. 

as a poem, so " absolutely worthless " as he imagined 
it to be. The verse is musical ; there are two direct 
pictures of nature, both of the sky ; the journey 
through the stars has some of the imaginative power 
which realized the flight of Asia and the Hours in 
the Prometheus .1 but all the polemical part is very 
prosaic. It is like a sermon in verse, and it has just 
the poetical quality we expect in a sermon. The 
latter portion is naturally the best. The most re- 
markable element Queen Mab possesses is didactic 
force. But, owing to its uncultivated rhetoric, that 
force is likely to tell most on very young persons, 
and on uneducated but intelligent working men, 
who may sympathize with its opinions. The poem 
had such an influence, and that influence was widely 
extended. 

Two years later, in 1815, all was changed. The 
circumstances of his life, illness, expectation of death, 
made him lose, in losing all vigor and joy, his inter- 
est in man, and Alastor, his next long poem, is 
entirely occupied with his own solitary thought and 
life. The preface he wrote explains the meaning of 
the poem, and, contrasted with the poem, reveals 
that double nature in Shelley of which I write. He 
repudiates in it, with all the sternness of a moralist, 
yet with self-pity, the life described in Alastor ; and 
the lines with which he closes the poem itself — "It 
is a woe too deep for tears," etc., are a cry of sorrow 
and reproach against one who desired to work for 
man, but who wasted his life in pursuit of that 
unattainable beauty his soul could dream of, but 
not realize. 



PREFACE. xi 

Of all Shelley's longer poems, Alastor leaves on 
the general reader the easiest impression of an artis- 
tic whole. The subject is one, and never varies from 
itself: it is closely clung to from beginning to end, 
and is deeply felt throughout. The poetry and its 
art, both imaginative and technical, are of course 
less great than they became in after work, but so 
far as unity of conception and steadiness of expres- 
sion and form are concerned, even Adonais is less 
artistic than Alastor. Shelley's personality absorbs 
the poem. The extreme ideality of the treatment 
alone relieves the intensity of this personal revela- 
tion, and makes it not too overwhelming to give 
pleasure. The natural descriptions prove how 
deeply Shelley had felt some of the larger aspects 
of Nature, and the melody of their verse is at times 
like the harmonies we seem to hear among waters 
and woods ; but Nature in this poem is never de- 
scribed for herself alone, never for pure joy in her. 
She is made to reflect the thoughts and passion of 
the wandering poet until the very last, when his life 
and that of the moon ebb away together. This is 
deliberately done, and nowhere in a finer way than 
in the description of the long walk down the glen. 
We follow step by step the interpenetration of the 
poet's dying soul and of the various changes of the 
scene. As the brook flows to the precipice, so does 
his life ; as the valley alters its landscape, so does 
the landscape in his heart. The skill and intensity 
with which this is wrought out is the cause of the 
fascination that passage has for all who read it. 

In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and to Mont 



xii PREFACE. 

Blanc, written after Alastor, Shelley, though writing 
only as the artist of his own thought, has recovered 
some of his hopes for Man. He tries to connect his 
worship of Beauty with the redemption of the race ; 
he speaks of the Power hidden in the great mountain 
to "repeal large codes of fraud and woe." His Con- 
tinental journey had brought him new health, and 
his life, new happiness, and with them came back the 
old longing and the old interest to play his part in 
the movement of the world. The result was the Re- 
volt of Islam. Its genesis and its aim are explained 
in the preface with which he accompanied the poem. 
It seemed to Shelley that the age of despair that fol- 
lowed the end of the French Revolution was over, 
and that now, when the reaction from that trance of 
failure had begun, the time had arrived for him to 
speak. In that belief he composed this poem. It 
strove to kindle afresh the flame of liberty, but it had 
no effect on the exhausted Englishmen of 1818. 
Nor, as poetry, did it deserve to have a great effect. 
It is the most unbalanced of all his works. The 
interest is human, but it is too frequently taken out 
of the world of actual human life to awaken practical 
emotion. Were the scenery of the poem all ideal, or 
all real, we should not be so troubled while we read. 
Were the poem supremely ethical or supremely emo- 
tional, had it any unity at all, it might keep its power 
over us. But it has no unity, not even in feeling. 
Its emotion is unequal ; we are continually changing 
the atmosphere, and are overchilled or overheated. 
There is no artistic fusion of the poetry which aims 
at giving a high pleasure with that which aims at 



PREFACE. xiii 

awakening man to his duties. That fusion was 
made in the ProDietheiis Unbomid^ but here it was 
not made. 

And now another of these changes took place. 
Shelley fell ill again, the threatened loss of his 
children preyed upon him, and he left England for 
ever in 1818. He lost again for a time his enthu- 
siasm for man, and the characteristic of the work of 
this year is sadness deepening into misery. With 
very few exceptions the poems are personal. One, 
however, differs from all that preceded it. Julian 
and Maddalo, composed at the end of the year, is 
personal, but still not so much so as to prevent 
Shelley from painting, with a firm hand, another 
character than his own. It is the first instance of 
that power of losing himself in the creation of dis- 
tinct personages which enabled him to write the 
drama of the Cenci. Jidian and Maddalo has unity, 
and the materials are carefully woven together. The 
style is subdued to a quiet level, and the imagination, 
which ran riot in the Revolt of Islam, is curbed to do 
its work, and only its special work, by the will of the 
poet. Reading it, we should predict that if again the 
enthusiasm for man should awaken in Shelley's heart, 
the work he would do on the subject would be more 
worthy of his power. It did awaken, and in how 
different a form it came ! It was no longer hampered 
by his notion that he must directly attack evil. It 
rose at once and easily, taking with it all the subjects 
of the Revolt of Islam, into the region of pure art, 
and there, in the world of passion and beauty and 
fire, he wrote the Prometheus Unbound. That poem 



xiv PREFACE. 

is the marriage of Shelley's double nature, the fusion 
for creative work of the lover of man and the poet. 
He reaches in it that culminating point at which the 
thinker on man gives his best-loved materials to the 
artist, and the artist breathes into them life and 
beauty. 

The same vivid interest in humanity was then made 
special in the Cenci, a tragedy wrought out with so 
much temperance of imagination, directness of emo- 
tion, and closeness of thought, that it is the strangest 
contrast to the Projnetheus . The range of power 
implied in the production of these two dramas within 
twelve months, each so great, and so unlike, is rarely 
to be paralleled among the poets below those of the 
highest order. It is all the more wonderful when we 
think that about the same time such poems were also 
created as the Sensitive Plant, the Skylark, the Cloud, 
Arethusa, and the Ode to the West Wind. The last 
alone is enough to place Shelley apart from the other 
lyrical poets of England. In it, as in the Prometheus, 
and still more splendidly, all his powers and his 
poetic subjects are wrought into a whole. The 
emotion awakened by the approaching storm sets on 
fire other sleeping emotions in his heart, and the 
whole of his being bursts into flame around the first 
emotion. This is the manner of the genesis of all 
the noblest lyrics. He passes from magnificent union 
of himself with Nature and magnificent realization of 
her storm and peace, to equally great self-description, 
and then mingles all nature and all himself together, 
that he may sing of the restoration of mankind. 
There is no song in the whole of our literature more 



PREFACE, XV 

passionate, more penetrative, more full of the force 
by which the idea and its form are united into one 
creation . 

This , time, during which Shelley's twofold being 
was married for creative work, did not last long. 
The two elements always tended to separate, and now 
the special Shelley element, which fled from man into 
the recesses of his own heart, or communed with the 
ideal Nature which he made for himself out of the 
apparent world, began to absorb him, and finally 
drove out the other. 

At the beginning of this reaction he was still gay, 
often bright ; and the Letter to Maria Gisborne is 
one of the rare poems in which Shelley is at peace. 
An air of home and happiness flows through its 
familiar and melodious verse. The Witch of Atlas 
also belongs to this time ; a poem in which he sent 
his imagination out, like a child into a meadow, with- 
out any aim save to enjoy itself. Now and again 
Shelley himself, as it were from a distance, alters or 
arranges the manner of the sport, as if with some in- 
tention, but never so much as to spoil the natural 
wildness of the Imagination's play. Enough is done 
to suggest that there may be a meaning in it all, but 
not enough to tell that meaning. " I mean nothing," 
Shelley would have said ; " I did not write the poem. 
My imaginatign made it of her own accord." Nor 
was he so self-absorbed at first as wholly to neglect 
the cause of man. The Ode to Liberty, the Ode to 
Naples, belong to this summer and autumn of 1820. 

We pass into the isolated poet with the Sensitive 
Plant, the companionless flower ; and from this time 



xvi PREFACE. 

forth the old Shelley, who loved Mankind, is dead. 
The only exception is the choral drama of Hellas, 
written in a transient enthusiasm for the cause of 
Greece. " I try to be what I might have been," he 
says, " but am not successful. It was written with- 
out much care, and in one of those few moments of 
enthusiasm which now seldom visit me, and which 
make me pay dear for their visits." Two poems, 
however, preceded Hellas ; Epipsychidion and Adoii- 
ais. Both are written by the lonely artist; nor is 
there any trace in them of the Shelley who prophesied 
for Man. Of Epipsychidion I have spoken in the 
notes of this book. The ideal passion, in which it 
originated, hid him in the light of thought, far away 
from humanity, and he never quite got back again. 

Adonais, awakened in him not only by his sympa- 
thy with Keats, but also by the resemblance of the 
fate of Keats to his own, is almost as much concerned 
with Shelley as with its subject. There is nothing 
in English poetry so steeped in passionate personality 
as the description of himself in stanzas xxxi-iv. It 
is almost too close, too unveiled, too intense to have 
been written. The only other poet — for Byron^s 
self-description is written with a view to effect — who 
has approached the wild self-sorrow of it, is Cowper, 
and he uses the same simile of the stricken stag. 
The poem is, as Shelley said, " a highly wrought 
piece of art." Its abstract spirituality, and its philos- 
ophy, remove it from the ordinary apprehension, 
and are the cause why it is less read than Alastor. 
But, in truth, Shelley himself, and the scenery and 
personages he creates in this abstract realm, are more 



PREFACE, xvii 

real in this poem than in others which have to do 
with the actual world. It suited him to write about 
a spirit, and he wrote as he were himself a spirit. 
The Dreams which hover around Adonais, the Splen- 
dors and Glooms, Morning with the tears in her hair, 
Spring wild with grief, Echo singing in the hills, 
Urania flying to mourn beside the bier — Shelley has 
succeeded in giving them all being. While we read, 
we believe in the reality of this world as we believe 
in our dreams while we dream. The power of doing 
this is unique, and is due not only to imagination at 
its height, but also to keenness of abstract' intellect. 
His grip of these impalpable personages is quite cer- 
tain. He creates them, and then he sees and hears 
them. Owing to this the conduct of the poem is 
clear. The unremitting beauty of the lines so engages 
attention as at first to forbid an analysis of the 
arrangement, but when that analysis is made, the 
pleasure Adonais gives is not disturbed, but doubled. 
And how passionate it is throughout, more passionate 
than most of his love poems! It is unceasingly 
strange, and the strangeness adds, from outside, to 
the charm of Shelley's poetry, to find him writing 
with a far greater intensity of feeling about the sorrow 
of Urania and the Dreams, about the Spirit of Love 
in the Universe, about Keats in the spiritual world, 
and about his own wearied and solitary heart, than 
he ever writes about men or women, about human 
love, or about the personal suffering of others. 

A new element of isolation, that created by a pas- 
sion which circumstances forbade him to pursue, 
separated him now, at the close of his life, still more 



xviii PREFACE. 

from Mankind, and in that temper he died. But 
there are some proofs, to which I shall afterwards 
draw attention, that he would, as before, have passed 
out of this lonely inner life, and found himself again 
in sympathy with the external. Had he lived, he 
would have once more appeared as the Singer of 
Man, and in the cause of men. But the swift wind 
and the mysterious sea, the things he loved, slew 
their lover — a common fate — and we hear no more 
his singing. His work was done, and its twofold 
nature may well be imaged by the Sea that received 
into its uninhabited breast his uncompanioned spirit ; 
for, while its central depths know only solitude, over 
its surface are always passing to and fro the life and 
fortunes of humanity. 

But the sea gave up its dead, and all of Shelley's 
body that was rescued from flood and fire lies now 
where the rise of the ground ends, in a dark nook 
of the Aurelian wall. So deep is that resting-place 
in shadow that the violets blossom later there than 
on " the slope of green access " where, seen from 
Shelley's grave, the flowers grow over the dust of 
Adonais. We may be glad that both were buried in 
Italy rather than in England, for, though no Italian 
could have written their poetry, yet it was, — in all 
things else different, — of that spirit which Italy 
awakens in Englishmen who love her, rather than of 
the purely English spirit. The Italian air, the senti- 
ment of Italy, fled and dreamed through their poems, 
but most through those of Shelley. It was but fit- 
ting, then, that Shelley, whose fame was England's, 
should be buried in the city which is the heart of 



PREFACE. xix 

Italy. But he was born far away from this peaceful 
and melancholy spot, and grew up to manhood under 
the gray skies of England, until its Universities, its 
Church, its Society, its Law and its dominant policy 
became inhospitable to him, nay, even his own father 
cast him out. They all had, in the opinion of sober 
men of that time, good cause to make him a stranger, 
for he attacked them all, and it would be neither wise 
or true, nor grateful to Shelley himself,* were he to be 
put forward as a genius unjustly treated, or as one 
who deserved or asked for pity. Those who separate 
themselves from society, and war against its dearest 
maxims, if they are as resolute in their choice, and as 
firm in their beliefs as Shelley, count the cost, and 
do not or rarely complain when the penalty is exacted. 
He was exiled, and it was no wonder. The opinion 
of the world did not trouble him, nor was that a won- 
der. But as this exile is the most prominent fact of 
his life, its influence is sure to underlie his work. 
The second question that any one who writes of 
Shelley has to ask, is, How did this exile from the 
Education, Law, Religion, and Society of his coun- 
try, and from the soil of his country itself, affect his 
poetry? 

It had a very great influence, partly for good and 
partly for evil. The good it did is clear. It deep- 
ened his individuality and the power which issued 
from that source. It set him free from the poetic 
conventions to which his art might have yielded too 
much obedience in England — a good which the ob- 
scurity of Keats also procured for him — it prevented 
him from being worried too much by the blind worms 



XX PREFACE. 

of criticism, it enabled him to develop himself more 
freely, and it placed him in contact with a natural 
scenery, fuller and sunnier than he could ever have 
had in England, in which his love of beauty found so 
happy and healthy a food that it came to perfect 
flower. In Italy also, where impulse even more than 
reason urges intelligence and inspires genius, lyrical 
poetry, which is born of impulse, is more natural and 
easy, though not better, than elsewhere, and the very 
inmost spirit of Shelley, deeper than his metaphysics 
or his love of Man and inspiring both, deeper even 
than any personal passion, was the lyrical longing 
of his whole body, soul, and spirit — " O that I had 
wings like a dove ; then would I flee away, and be 
at rest." 

But the good this exile did his art was largely 
counterbalanced by its harm. Shelley's individu- 
ality, unchecked by that of others, grew too great, 
and tended not only to isolate him from men, but to 
prevent his art from becoming conversant enough 
with human life. The absence of critical sympathy 
of a good kind, such as that which flows from one 
poet to another in a large society, left some of his 
work, as it left some of Keats's, more formless, mon*. 
intemperate, more impalpable, more careless, more 
apart from the realities of life, than it ought to have 
been in the most poetical of poets since the days of 
Elizabeth. Even in his lyric work, the impassioned 
impulse would have failed less often to fulfil its form 
perfectly ; there would not have been so many frag- 
ments thrown aside for want of patience or power tr 
complete them, had he been less personal, less sut- 



PREFACE. xxi 

ject to individual freakishness, more subject to the 
unexpressed criticism which floats, as it were, in the 
air of a large literary society, and constrains the art 
of the poet into measured act and power. And as to 
Nature, we should perhaps have had, with his genius, 
a much wider and less ideal representation of her, 
had he not been so enthralled by the vastness and 
homelessness of Swiss, and by the ideality of Italian, 
scenery. Even when he did write in England itself, 
the recollected love of Switzerland and the Rhinf. 
mingled with the impressions he received from the 
Thames, and produced a scenery, as in certain pas- 
sages in Alastor and the Revolt of Islam, which is not 
directly studied from anything in heaven or earth. 
It is none the worse for that, but it is not Nature, it 
is Art. 

These are general considerations, but there were 
some more particular results, partly good and partly 
evil, of this separation of Shelley from the ordinary 
religious and political views of English society. 

A good deal of his poetry became polemical, and 
polemical, like satiric poetry, is apart from pure art. 
It attacks evil directly, and the poet, his mind being 
then fixed not on the beautiful but on the base, writes 
prosaically. Or it embodies a creed in verse, and, 
being concerned with doctrine, becomes dull. In both 
cases the poet misses, as Shelley did, that inspiration 
of the beautiful which arises from the seeing of truth, 
not from the seeing of a lie ; from the love of true 
ideas, not from their intellectual perception. The 
verses, for example, in the Ode to Liberty, which 
directly attack kingcraft and priestcraft, however 



XXU PREFACE. 

gladly one would see their sentiments in prose, are 
inferior as poetry to all the rest ; and it is the same 
throughout all Shelley's poetry of direct attack on evil. 
This polemical element in the Revolt of Islam., and the 
endeavor to lay down in it his revolutionary creed, 
are additional causes of the wastes of prosiac poetry 
which make it so unreadable. Th-e very splendor 
and passion of the passages devoted to Nature and 
Love contrast so sharply, like burning spaces of sun- 
light on a gray sea, with the wearisome whole, that 
they lose half their value, and disturb, like so much 
else, the unity of the poem. The same things seem 
true of Rosalind afid Helen., and of those political 
poems which are direct attacks on abuses in England. 
On the other hand, when Shelley wrote on these evils 
indirectly, inspired by the opposing truths, concerned 
with their beauty, and borne upwards by delight in 
them, his work entered the realm of art, and his 
poetry became magnificent. There is no finer ex- 
ample of this than Prometheus Unbound. The sub- 
ject, is at root the same as that of the Revolt of Islain, 
the things opposed are the same, the doctrine is the 
same, but the whole method of approaching his idea 
and fulfilling its form is changed, and all the ques- 
tions are brought into that artistic representation 
which stirs around them inspiring and enduring emo- 
tion. 

The good Shelley did in this way was very great. 
At a time when England, still influenced by its ab- 
horrence of the Reign of Terror, by its fear of France 
and Napoleon, was most dead to the political ideas 
that had taken form in 1789, Shelley gave voice, 



PREFACE. xxiii 

through art, to these ideas, and encouraged that hope 
of a golden age which, however vague, does so much 
for human progress. He threw around these things 
imaginative emotion, and added all its power to the 
struggle for freedom. 

Still greater is the unrecognized work he did in 
the same way for theology in England. That theology 
was no better than all theology had become under 
the influence of the imperial and feudal ideas of 
Europe. Its notion of God, and of man in relation 
to God, partly Hebraic, and therefore sacerdotal and 
sacrificial, partly deeply dyed with asceticism and 
other elements derived from the Oriental notion of 
the evil of matter, was further modified by the polit- 
ical views of the Roman Empire, transferred to God 
by the Roman Church. And when the universal 
ideas regarding mankind, and a return to nature, 
were put forth by France, they clashed instantly with 
this limited, sacerdotal, ascetic, aristocratic, and feudal 
theology. The sovereign right of God, because He 
was omnipotent, to destroy the greater part of His 
subjects, the right of a caste of priests to impose their 
doctrines on all, and to exile from religion all who did 
not agree with them ; the view that whatever God was 
represented to do was right, though it might directly 
contradict the nature, the conscience, and the heart of 
Man ; these, and other related views had been brought 
to the bar of humanity, and condemned from the intel- 
lectual point of view by a whole tribe of thinkers. 
But if a veteran theology is to be disarmed and slain, 
it needs to be brought not only into the arena of 
thought and argument, but into the arena of poetic 



xxiv PREFACE. 

emotion. A great part of that latter work was done 
in England by Shelley. He indirectly made, as time 
went on, an ever-increasing number of men feel that 
the will of God could not be in antagonism to the 
universal ideas concerning Man, that His character 
could not be in contradiction to the moralities of the 
heart, and that the destiny He willed for mankind 
must be as universal and as just and loving as Himself. 
There are more clergymen, and more religious lay- 
men than we imagine, who trace to the emotion 
Shelley awakened in them when they were young, 
their wider and better views of God. Many men, 
also, who were quite careless of religion, yet cared 
for poetry, were led, and are still led, to think con- 
cerning the grounds of a true worship, by the moral 
enthusiasm which Shelley applied to theology. He 
made emotion burn around it, and we owe to him 
a great deal of its nearer advance to the teaching 
of Christ. But we owe it, not to those portions 
of his poetry which denounced what was false and 
evil, but to those which represented and revealed, 
in delight in its beauty, what was good and true. 
Had he remained in England, I do not think he 
would have worked on this matter in the ideal way of 
Prometheus Unbound, because continual contact with 
the reigning theology would have driven his easily 
wrought anger into direct violence. In Italy, in 
exile, it was different. The polemical temper in 
which he wrote the Revolt of Islam changed into the 
poetical temper in which he wrote Prometheus Un- 
bo7tnd. 

Connected with this, but not with his exile, is the 



PRE FA CE. XXV 

question, in what way his behef as to a Source of 
Nature influenced his art. He was not an atheist or 
a materiaHst. If he may be said to have occupied 
any theoretical position, it was that of an Ideal Pan- 
theist ; the position which, with regard to Nature, a 
modern poet who cares for the subject, naturally — 
whatever may be his personal view — adopts in the 
realm of his art. Wordsworth, a plain Christian at 
home, wrote about Nature as a Pantheist : the artist, 
as I said, loves to conceive of the Universe, not as 
dead, but as alive. Into that belief Shelley, in hours 
of inspiration, continually rose, and his work is sel- 
dom more impassioned and beautiful than in the 
passages where he feels and believes in this manner. 
The finest example is towards the close of the 
Adonais. In his mind, however, the living spirit 
which, in its living, made the Universe, was not con- 
ceived of as Thought, as Wordsworth conceived it, 
but as Love operating into Beauty; and there is a 
passage on this idea in the fragment of the Coliseum^ 
which is as beautiful in prose as that in Adonais is in 
verse. But it is only in higher poetic hours that 
Shelley seems or cares to realise this belief. In the 
quieter realms of poetry, in daily life, he confessed 
no such creed plainly ; he had little or no belief in a 
thinking or loving existence behind the phenomenal 
universe. It is infinitely improbable, he says, that 
the cause of mind is similar to mind. Nothing can 
be more characteristic of him — and he has the same 
temper in other matters — than that he should have 
a faith with regard to a Source of Nature, into which 
he could soar when he pleased, in which he could 



xxvi PRE FA CE. 

live for a time, but which he did not choose to live 
in, to define, or to realize, continuously. When, in 
the Prometheus Uiiboimd^ he is forced, as it were, to 
realize a central cause, he creates Demogorgon, the 
dullest of all his impersonations. It is scarcely an 
impersonation. Once he calls it a "living spirit," 
but it has neither form nor outline in his mind. He 
keeps it before him as an " awful Shape." 

The truth is, the indefinite was a beloved element 
of his life. "Lift not the painted veil," he cries, 
"which those who live call Life." His worst pain 
was when he thought he had lifted it, and seemed to 
know the reality. But he did not always believe that 
he had done so, or he preferred to deny his conclu- 
sion. Not as a thinker in prose, but as a poet, he 
frequently loved the vague with an intensity which 
raised it almost into an object of worship. The 
speech of the Third Spirit, in the Ode to Heaven, is 
a wonderful instance of what I may call the rapture 
in indefiniteness. But this rapture had its other side, 
and when he was depressed by ill-health, the sense 
of a voiceless, boundless abyss, which for ever held 
its secret, and in which he floated, deepened his 
depression. The horror of a homeless and centreless 
heart which then beset him, is passionately expressed 
in the Cenci. Beatrice is speaking — 

" Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts, if there should be 
No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world; 
The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world." 

But, on the whole, whether it brought him pain or 
joy, he preferred to be without a fixed belief with 



PREFACE. xxvii 

regard to a source of Nature. Could he have done 
otherwise, could he have given continuous substance 
in his thoughts to the great conception of ideal Pan- 
theism in w^hich Wordsworth rested, Shelley's whole 
work on Nature and his description of her would 
have been more direct, palpable, and homely. He 
would have loved Nature more, and made us love it 
more. 

The result of all this is that a great deal of his 
poetry of Nature has no ground in thought, and con- 
sequently wants power. It is not that he could not 
have had this foundation and its strength. Both are 
his when he chooses. But, for the most part, he did 
not choose. Such was his temperament that he liked 
better to live with Nature and be without a centre for 
her. He would be 

Dizzy, lost — but unbewailing. 

But I am not sure whether the love of the unde- 
fined did not, in the first instance, arise out of his 
love of the constantly changing, and that itself out of 
the very character of his intellect, and the temper of 
his heart. His intellect, incessantly shaken into 
movement by his imagination, continually threw into 
new shapes the constant ideas he possessed. His 
heart, out of which are the issues of imagination, 
loved deeply a few great conceptions, but wearied 
almost immediately of any special form in which he 
embodied them, and changed it for another. In the 
matter of human love, he was uncontent with all the 
earthly images he formed of the ideal he had loved 
and continued to love in his own soul, and he could 



xj>:viii PREFACE. 

not but tend to change the images. In the ordinary 
Hfe of feeling, the moment any emotion arose in his 
heart, a hundred others came rushing from every 
quarter into the original feeling, and mingled with it, 
and changed its outward expression. Sometimes 
they all clamored for expression, and we see that 
Shelley often tried to answer their call. It is when 
he does this that he is most obscure — obscure 
through abundance of feelings and their forms. His 
intellect, heart, and imagination were in a kind of 
Herachtean flux, perpetually evolving fresh images, 
and the new, in swift succession, clouding the old ; 
and then, impatient weariness of rest or of any one 
thing whatever, driving forward within him this in- 
cessant movement, he sank, at last and for the time, 
exhausted — " As summer clouds disburthened of 
their rain." 

There is no need to illustrate this from his poetry. 
The huddling rush of images, the changeful crowd of 
thoughts are found on almost every page. It is often 
only the oneness of the larger underlying emotion or 
idea which makes the work clear. We strive to grasp 
a Proteus as we read. In an instant the thought or 
the feeling Shelley is expressing becomes impalpable, 
vanishes, reappears in another form, and then in a 
multitude of other forms, each in turn eluding the 
grasp of the intellect, until at last we seize the god 
himself, and know what Shelley meant, or Shelley 
felt. In all this he resembles, at a great distance, 
Shakspere ; and has, at that distance, and in this 
aspect of his art, a strength and a weakness similar 
to, but not identical with, that which Shakspere 



PREFACE. xxix 

possessed, — the strength of changeful activity of 
imagination, the weakness of being unable, through 
eagerness, to omit, to select, to co-ordinate his images. 
Yet, at his highest, when the full force of genius is 
urged by full and dominant emotion, what poetry it 
is ! How magnificent is the impassioned unity of 
the whole in spite of the diversity of the parts ! But 
this lofty height is reached in only a few of Shelley's 
lyrics, and in a few passages in his longer poems. 

At almost every point, the scenery of the sky he 
drew so fondly images this temper of Shelley's mind, 
th:s incessant building and unbuilding, this cloud- 
changefulness of his irnagination. 

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, 

And out of the caverns of rain, 
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb 

I arise and unbuild it again. 

That is a picture of Shelley himself at work on a feel- 
ing or on a thought. " I change, but I cannot die." 
I might illustrate this love of the changing from the 
history of his life, of his affections, of his theories ; 
from his varied nature, and way of work, as the prose 
thinker and the poet ; from the variety of the subjects 
on which he wrote, and which he half attempted — 
for he naturally fell into the fragmentary — from the 
eagerness with which he searched for new thought, 
new experiences of feeling, new literatures, even from 
his love of the strange and sometimes of the horrible ; 
from that uncontent he had in the doctrines of others, 
until he had added to them, as he did to Plato's doc- 
trine of Love, something of his own in order to make 



XXX PREFACE. 

them new, — were there any necessity to enlarge on 
that which stands so clear. In all these things, what 
was said of Shelley's movements to and fro in the 
house at Lerici is true of his movement through the 
house of thought or of feeling. " Oh, he comes and 
goes like a spirit, no one knows when or where." 
But it remains to be said, that all through this sec- 
ondr.ry changefulness, he held fast to certain primary 
ideas of life, of morality, and of his art, which no one 
who cares for him can fail to discover. 

There was, then, in Shelley this love of indefinite- 
ness, and this love of changefulness. Which of the 
two was the cause of the other I cannot tell, but I am 
inclined to think that the latter was the first. It is 
better, however, to keep them both equally in view 
in the study of Shelley's art, and they are both well 
illustrated in his poetry of Nature. 

I have said that his love of the indefinite with re- 
gard to a source of Nature weakened his work on Na- 
ture. His love of changefulness also weakened it by 
luring the imagination away from a direct sight of the 
thing into the sight of a multitude of images suggested 
by the thing. 

But in the case of those who have great genius, that 
which enfeebles one part of their work often gives 
strength to another, and in three several ways these 
elements in Shelley's mind made his w^ork on Nature 
of great value. 

I. His love of that which is indefinite and change- 
ful made him enjoy and describe better than any other 
English poet that scenery of the clouds and sky which 
is indefinite owing to infinite change of appearance. 



PREFACE. xxxi 

The incessant forming and unforming of the vapors 
which he describes in the last verse of The Cloud, is 
that which he most cared to paint. Wordsworth often 
draws, and with great force, the aspect of the sky, and 
twice with great elaboration in the Excursion ; but it 
is only a momentary aspect, and it is mixed up with 
illustrations taken from the works of men, with the 
landscape of the earth below where men are moving, 
with his own feelings about the scene, and with moral 
or imaginative lessons. Shelley, when he is at work 
on the sky, troubles it with none of these human mat- 
ters, and he describes not only the momentary aspect, 
but also the change and progress of the sunset or the 
storm. And he does this with the greatest care, and 
with a characteristic attention to those delicate tones 
and half-tones of color which resemble the subtle 
imaginations and feelings he liked to discover in hu- 
man Nature, and to which he gave form in poetry. 

In his very first poem, in Queen Mab (Part II.), 
there is one of these studies of Sunset. It is splen- 
didly eclipsed by that in the beginning of Julian and 
Maddalo, where the Euganean Hills are lifted away 
from the earth and made a portion of the scenery of 
the sky. A special moment of sunset, with the moon 
and the evening-star in a sky reddened with tempest, 
is given in Hellas, but here, being in a drama, it is 
mingled with the fate of an empire. The Dawns are 
drawn with the same care as the sunsets, but with 
less passion. There are many of them, but the most 
beautiful perhaps is that in the beginning of the 
second Act of the Prometheus . The changes of 
color, as the light increases in the spaces of pure 



xxxii PREFACE. 

sky and in the clo'jds, are watched and described with 
precise truth ; the slow progress of the dawn, during 
a long time, is noted down line by line, and all the 
movement of the mists and of the clouds "shep- 
herded by the slow unwilling wind." Nor is that 
minuteness of observation wanting which is the proof 
of careful love. Shelley's imaginative study of beauty 
is revealed in the way the growth of the dawn is set 
before us by the waxing and waning of the light of 
the star, as the vapors rise and melt before the morn. 
The Storms are even better than the sunsets and 
dawns. I have drawn attention in the notes to the 
finest of these in the first canto of the Revolt of 
Isla?n. There is another description at the beginning 
of the eleventh canto of the same poem (p. 83 of this 
book), in which the vast wall of blue cloud before 
which gray mists are flying is cloven by the wind, and 
the sunbeams, like a river of fire flowing between 
lofty banks, pour through the chasm across the sea, 
while the shattered vapors which the coming storm 
has driven forth to make the opening, are tossed, all 
crimson, into the sky. This is a favorite picture of 
Shelley's. In the Vision of the Sea it is transferred 
from sunset to sunrise. The fierce wind coming from 
the west rushes like a flooded river upon the dense 
clouds which are piled in the east, and rends them 
asunder, and through the gorge thus cleft 

the beams of the sunrise flow in, 
Unimpeded, keen, golden and crystalline, 
Banded armies of light and air. 

The description is a little over-wrought, but criticism 
has no voice when it thinks that no other poet has 



PREFACE. xxxiii 

ever attempted to render, with the same absokite 
loss of himself, the successive changes, minute by 
minute, of such an hour of tempest and of sunrise. 
We are alone with Nature ; I might even say, We 
see Nature alone with herself. Still greater, more 
poetic, less sensational, is the approach of the gale in 
the Ode to the West Wind, where the wind itself is 
the river on which the forest of the sky shakes down 
its foliage of clouds, and these are tossed upwards like 
a Maenad's " uplifted hair," or trail downwards, like 
the '*■ locks ■" of Typhon,^ the vanguard of the tempest. 
In gathered mass behind, the congregated might of 
vapors is rising to vault the heaven like a sepulchral 
dome. Nothing can be closer than the absolute truth 
to the working of the clouds that fly before the main 
body of a storm, which is here kept in the midst of 
these daring comparisons of the imagination. . 

The same delight in the indefinite and changeful 
aspects of Nature appears in Shelley's power of de- 
scribing vast landscapes, such as that seen at noon- 
tide from the Euganean Hills, or that which the poet 
in Alastor looks upon from the edge of the mountain 
precipice. Both swim in the kind of light that makes 
all objects undefined, deep noon, and sunset light. 

Kindred to this is Shelley's pleasure in the intri- 
cate, changeful, and incessant weaving and unweaving 
of nature's life in a great forest. In the Recollection 
it is the Pisan Pineta he describes, and that is a 
painting directly after Nature. But he has his own 

1 I wonder that Mr. Ruskin has not quoted this verse in 
the Angel of the Sea {Modern Painters, vol. v.). Shelley's 
lines might well form a text for that chapter. 



xxxiv PREFACE. 

ideal forest, of which he tells in Alastor, in Rosalind 
and Helen.) in the Triumph of Life., and again and 
again in the Promethens. It is no narrow wood, 
but a universe of forest ; full of all trees and flowers, 
in which are streams, and pools, and lakes, and lawny 
glades, and hills, and caverns; and in whose multi- 
tudinous scenery Shelley's imagination could lose 
and find itself without an end. The special love of 
caverns, with their dim recesses, adds another charac- 
teristic touch. These then, — The scenery of the 
sky, of the forest, of the vast plain, — are the aspects 
of nature Shelley loved the most, and out of the weak- 
ness that elsewhere made him too indefinite, and too 
uncertain through desire of change, for Wordsworth's 
special kind of descriptive power, arose the force with 
which he realized them. 

2. Again, just because Shelley had no wish to con- 
ceive of Nature as involved in one definite thought, he 
had the power of conceiving the life of separate things 
in Nature with astonishing individuality. When he 
wrote of the Cloud, or of Arethusa, or of the Moon, 
or of the Earth, as distinct existences, he. was not led 
away from their solitary personality by any universal 
existence in which they were merged, or by the neces- 
sity of adding to these any tinge of humanity, any 
elements of thought or love, such as the Pantheist 
is almost sure to add. His imagination was free to 
realise pure Nature, and the power by which he does 
this, as well as the work done, are quite unique in 
modern poetry. Theology, with its one Creator of 
the Universe ; Pantheism, with its ''■ one spirit's 
plastic stress ; " Science with its one Energy, forbid 



PREFACE. XXXV 

the modern poet, whose mind is settled into any one 
of these three views, to see anything in Nature as 
having a separate Ufe of its own. He cannot, as a 
Greek could do, divide the life of the Air from that of 
the Earth, of the cloud from that of the stream. But 
Shelley, able to loosen himself from all these modern 
conceptions which unite the various universe, could 
and did, when he pleased, divide and subdivide the 
life of Nature in the same way as a Greek — and this 
is the cause why even in the midst of wholly modern 
imagery and a modern manner, one is conscious of a 
Greek note in many passages of his poetry of Nature. 
The little poem on the Dawn might be conceived by 
a primitive Aryan. It is ^ a Nature myth. But 
Shelley's conceptions of the life of these natural 
things are less human than even the Homeric Greek 
or early Indian poet would have made them. They 
described the work of Nature in terms of human act. 
Shelley's spirits of the Earth and Moon are utterly 
apart from our world of thought and from our life. 
Of this class of poems TJie Cloud is the most perfect 
example. It describes the life of the Cloud as it 
might have been a million years before man came on 
earth. The "sanguine Sunrise" and the "orbed 
Maiden," the moon, who are the playmates of the 
cloud, are pure elemental beings. 

The same observation is true if we take a poem on 
a living thing in Nature, like The Skylark^ into which 
human sentiment is introduced. The sentiment be- 
longs to Shelley, not to the lark. The bird has joy, 
but it is not our joy. It is " unbodied joy," nor " can 

1 See p. 15$ 



xxxvi PREFACE. 

we come near it." Wordsworth's Skylark is truer, 
perhaps, to the everyday life of the bird, and the poet 
remembers, because he loves his own home, that the 
singer will return to its nest ; but Shelley sees and 
hears the bird who, in its hour of inspired singing, 
will not recollect that it has a home. Wordsworth 
humanizes the whole spirit of "the pilgrim of the 
sky " — " True to the kindred points of heaven and 
home." Shelley never brings the bird into contact 
with us at all. It is left in the sky, singing ; it will 
never leave the sky. It is the archetype of the lark 
we seem to listen to, and yet we cannot conceive it, 
we have no power — "What thou art we know not." 
The flowers in the Sensitive Plmit have the same 
apartness from humanity, and are wholly different 
beings and in a diiferent world from the Daisy or the 
Celandine of Wordsworth. It is only the Sensitive 
Plant, and that is Shelley himself, which has an inner 
sympathy with the Lady of the garden. 

Shelley, then, could isolate and perceive distinct 
existences in Nature as if he were himself one of these 
existences. It was a strange power, and we naturally 
cannot love with a human love things so represented. 
In Wordsworth's poems we touch the human heart 
of flowers and birds. In Shelley's we touch "Shapes 
that haunt Thought's wildernesses." Yet it is quite 
possible, though we cannot feel aff"ection for Shelley's 
Cloud or Bird, that they are both truer to the actual 
fact of things than Wordsworth made his birds and 
clouds. Strip off the imaginative clothing from The 
Cloud, and Science will support every word of it. 
Let the Skylark sing, let the flowers grow, for their 



PREFACE. xxxvii 

own joy alone. In truth, what sympathy have they, 
what sympathy has Nature with Man ? We may not 
like to think of Nature in this way ; we are left quite 
cold by The Cloudy and by the spirits of the Earth 
and Moon in the Prometheus', and if we are not left 
as cold by The Skylark, it is because we are made to 
think of our own sorrow, not because we care for the 
bird. But whether we like or no to see Nature in 
this fashion, we should be grateful for these unique 
representations, and to the poet who was able to 
make them. In this matter also Shelley's want of 
a central and uniting Thought in Nature made his 
strength. 

The other side of Shelley's relation to Nature is 
a remarkable contrast to this statement. When he 
was absorbed in his own being, and writing poems 
which concerned himself alone, he makes Nature the 
mere image of his own feelings, the creature of his 
mood. In his 'Mife alone doth Nature live." This 
was the natural result, at these times, of his intellec- 
tual rejection of such Pantheism as enabled Words- 
worth always to distinguish between himself and the 
Nature he perceived. The Nature Wordsworth saw 
we can love well, because it is not ourselves — never 
a reflection of ourselves. The Nature such as Shelley 
saw in Alastor is not easy to love, because it is our- 
selves in other form. For this reason also we are 
not able to love Nature, when thus represented by 
Shelley, so well as we love her in Wordsworth. ^ 

1 Shelley's love of the undefined and changing is still fur- 
ther illustrated by the fact that we see Nature in his poetry in 
these three ways — on all of which I have dwelt. We some- 



xxxviii PRE FA CE. 

3. Lastly, on this subject, the vagueness and 
changefulness of Shelley's feeling and view of Nature, 
except in the instances mentioned, the dreams and 
shadows of it in his poetry that incessantly form and 
dissolve like the upper clouds of the sky, each fleeting 
while its successor is being born, and few living long 
enough to be outlined, are the only images we possess 
in art, save perhaps in music, of the many hours we 
ourselves pass with Nature when we neither think nor 
feel, but drift and dream incessantly from one impres- 
sion to another, enjoying, but never defining our 
enjoyment, receiving moment by moment, but never 
caring to say to any single impression, " Stay and 
keep me company." In this thing also, Shelley's 
weakness made his power. 

This want of definite belief and of its force belongs 
also to his conception of the ideal state of mankind. 
He does not see quite clearly what he desires for 
man, and describes the golden age chiefly by nega- 
tives of wrong. At times he rises into a passionate 
realization of his Utopia, as he rises into Pantheism, 
but he cannot long remain in it. The high-wrought 
prophecy, too weak to keep the height it has gained, 
sinks down again and again into an abyss of seeming 
hopelessness. The last stanza of the Ode to Liberty 
is the type of many an hour of his life, and of the 
close of many a poem. But he never let hopelessness 
or depression master him. Shelley is full of resurrec- 

times look on her as the ideal Pantheist beholds her; we look 
on her again as the mere reflection of the poet's moods ; we 
look on her often as she maj' be in herself, apart from theories 
about her, apart firom man. , 



PREFACE. xxxix 

tion power, and the fall from the peak of prophecy is 
more the result of reaction after impassioned excite- 
ment, than the result of any unbelief in his hopes for 
men, or in that on which they were grounded. 

These hopes, that belief, had their strong founda- 
tion. There was one thing at least that Shelley 
grasped and realized with force in poetry — the 
moralities of the heart in their relation to the progress 
of Mankind. Love and its eternity; mercy, forgive- 
ness, and endurance, as forms of love ; joy and free- 
dom, justice and truth as the results of love ; the sov- 
ereign right of Love to be the ruler of the Universe, 
and the certainty of its victory, — these were the 
deepest realities, the only absolute certainty, the only 
centre in Shelley's mind ; and whenever, in behalf of 
the whole Race, he speaks of them, and of the duties 
and hopes that follow from them, strength is then in- 
stinctive and vital in his imagination. Neither now 
nor hereafter can men lose this powerful and profound 
impression. It is Shelley's great contribution to the 
progress of humanity. 

But he could not combine with this large view and 
this large sympathy with the interests of Man, per- 
sonal sympathy with personal human life. That is 
absent from his poetry, and his want of it w^as con- 
firmed by his exile. Confined to a small circle of 
which he was the centre, among foreigners, feeling 
himself repudiated by the society of his own country, 
and incapable of such quiet association with the lives 
of men and women as Wordsworth loved and en- 
joyed, it is no wonder that large spaces of human life 
are entirely unreflected and unidealized in his poetry. 



xl PREFACE. 

The common human heart was not his theme, nor 
did he care to write of it. And, so far, he is less uni- 
versal than Wordsworth, and less the great poet. But 
on the other hand he did two things, in his work on 
human nature, that Wordsworth could not do. First, 
he realized in song, so far as it was possible, the im- 
palpable dreams of the poetic temperament, those 
which, when they arise in happiness, he expresses in 
the little poem, Oit a poefs lips I slept ^ and others 
also less joyous — the lonely wanderings of regretful 
thought, the imagination in its hours of childlike play 
with images, the moments when we are on the edge 
where emotion and thought incessantly change into 
one another, the visions of Nature which we compose 
but which are not Nature, the sorrows and depres- 
sions which have no name and to which we allot no 
cause, the depths of passionate fancy when we have 
not only no relation to mankind, but hate to feel that 
relation. Of all this Wordsworth gives us nothing; 
and though what he does give us is of more use and 
worth to us as men who have to do with men, yet 
Shelley's work in this is dear to our personal life, and 
has in fact as much to do with one realm of humanity 
as the sorrow of Michael, or the daily life of the dales- 
men have with another. English poetry needed the 
expression of these things ; Shelley's expression of 
them is unique, but I doubt Avhether he would ever 
have expressed them in so complete a way had he 
not been thrown into isolation. 

Secondly, there is an element almost altogether 
wanting in Wordsworth, the absence of which forbids 
us to class him as a poet who has touched all the im- 



PREFACE. xli 

portant sides of human life — the element of pas- 
sionate love. A few of his poems, such as Barbara^ 
or in another kind, Laodarneia, solemnly glide into it 
and retreat, but on the whole, this, the most universal 
subject of lyric poetry, was not felt by Wordsworth. 
It was felt by Shelley, but not quite naturally, not as 
Burns, or even Byron felt it. Love, in his poetry, 
sometimes dies into dreams, sometimes likes its 
imagery better than itself. It is troubled with a 
philosophy ; it seems now and again to be even bored, 
if I may be allowed the word, by its own ideality. As 
Shelley soared but rarely into definite Pantheism, so 
he rose but rarely into definite passion, nor does he 
often care to realize it. It was frequently his delib- 
erate choice to celebrate the love which did not '' deal 
with flesh and blood," and as frequently, when he 
writes directly of love, he prefers to touch the lip of 
the cup, but not to drink, lest in the reality he should 
lose the charm of indefiniteness, of ignorance, of pur- 
suit. Of course he was therefore fickle. 

For this very reason, however, two realms in this 
aspect of his art belong to him. Neither of them is 
the realm of joyous passion, but one is the realm of 
its ideal approaches, and the other the realm of 
its ideal regret. No one has expressed so well the 
hopes, and fears, and fancies, and dreams, which the 
heart creates for its own pleasure and sorrow, when 
it plays with love which it realizes within itself, but 
which it never means to realize without ; and this is 
a realm which is so much lived in by many that they 
ought to be grateful to Shelley for his expression of 
it. No one else has done it, and it is perfectly done. 



xlii PREFACE. 

But still more perfect, and perhaps more beautiful 
than any other work of his, are the poems written in 
the realm of ideal Regret. Whenever he came close 
to earthly love, touched it, and then of his own will 
passed it by, it became, as he looked back upon it, 
ideal, and a part of that indefinite world he loved. 
The ineffable regret of having lost that which one 
did not choose to take, is most marvellously, most 
passionately expressed by Shelley. Song after song 
records it. The music changes from air to air, but 
the theme is the same, and so is the character of the 
music. And, like all the rest of his work, it is 
unique. 

But in this matter, a change passed over Shelley 
before he died. It is impossible not to feel that the 
poems written for Mrs. Williams, a whole chain of 
which exist, are different from the other love poems. 
They have the same imaginative qualities as the pre- 
vious songs, and they belong also to the two realms 
of which I have written above, but there is a new 
note in them, the beginning of the unmistakable 
directness of passion. It is, of course, modified by 
the circumstances, but there it is. And it is from 
the threshold of this actual world that he looks back 
on Epipsychidion and feels that it belonged to " a 
part of him that was already dead." The philosophy 
which made Emilia the shadow of a spiritual Beauty 
is conspicuous by its total absence from all these 
later love poems. Moreover, they are not, like the 
others, all written in the same atmosphere. The 
atmosphere of ideal love, however varied its cloud- 
imagery, is always the same thin ether. But these 



PREFACE. xliii 

poems breathe in the changing atmosphere of the 
Earthj and they one and all possess reality. Every 
one feels that Ariel to Miranda, The Invitation, The 
Recollection, have the variety of true passion. But 
none of them reach the natural joy of Burns in pas- 
sionate love. Two exceptions, however, exist, both 
dating from this time, and both written away from 
his own life — the Bridal Song, and the song To 
Night. These seem to prove that, had Shelley lived, 
we might have had from him vivid, fresh, and natural 
songs of passion. 

Had he lived ! Had not the sea been too envious, 
what might we not have possessed and loved! It 
were too curious perhaps to speculate, but Shelley 
seems to have been recovering the power of working 
on subjects beyond himself, in the quiet of those last 
days at Lerici. He was always capable of rising 
again, and the extreme clearness and positiive element 
of his intellect acted, like a sharp physician, on his 
passion- haunted heart and freed it, when it was out- 
wearied with its own feeling, from self-slavery. 

While still at Pisa, at the beginning of 1822, Shel- 
ley set to work on a Drama, Charles /., the motive of 
which was to be the ruin of the king through pride 
and its weakness, the same motive as Coriolanus. It 
was to be " the birth of severe and high feelings,''' 
and to transcend the Cenci as a work of art. But 
severe feeling was not then the temper of his mind, 
nor could he at that time lose himself enough to 
create an external world. He laid the play aside, 
saying that he had not sufficient interest in English 
history to continue it. Yet it is plain, even from the 



xliv PREFACE. 

fragments we possess, how great was the effort Shel- 
ley then made to realize, even more than in the Cenci, 
other characters than his own. There is not a trace 
in it of his own self. It is full of steady power, power 
more at its ease than in the Cenci. The characters 
stand clear, and are carefully distinguished, so as not 
only to represent the various elements in England 
which brought about, in their clashing together, the 
ruin of monarchy, but also to show the forces and 
weaknesses in each of the greater personages which 
led to their personal ruin or success. The uncon 
scious movement of Shelley's imagination — within 
the speeches set to each character — in vivid illustra- 
tion, in quick invention of changes of feeling, and in 
its harmonizing of the whole and the parts, is, like the 
excellence just mentioned, in the manner of Shak- 
spere's art, and approaches his strength. Archy, the 
fool, is made perhaps too imaginative in phrase, yet 
he is much nearer than any other poet's creation of 
the same kind to the fools of Shakspere, so wise 
because they are half mad. Yet neither in this, nor 
in the rest, does Shelley directly imitate Shakspere 
here, as he sometimes does in the Cenci. The prin- 
ciples of Shakspere's art are followed ; the work itself 
is quite original. The same thing is true of the blank 
verse. It is built on the model of Shakspere's, but it 
is Shelley's own, and its movement, sure to be beau- 
tiful in the hands of this master of all melody in all 
kinds of verse, is more free, more fitted to the chang- 
ing moods of the speakers, and more delightful than 
it is in the Cettci. The noble speech of Hampden, 
with which this fragment concludes, illustrates and 



PREFACE. V xlv 

confirms all I have said. It is quite plain that it 
cannot be said of the artist who did this piece of 
work that he had exhausted his vein. 

It becomes still more clear that Shelley would have 
done more for us when we consider the Truunph of 
Life, the gravest of his poems. Its personal interest 
is as great as its interest for this generation. He 
may have been composing it when the sea over- 
whelmed him. Over it gathers, then, all the tender- 
ness which belongs to last words, and all the power 
they possess to awaken love, pity, and enthusiasm. 
Its somewhat morbid view of life is not to be won- 
dered at, so much as to be forgiven for the sake of 
the strength which rises through the dim allegory, 
like a fountain which will become a river. It proves 
that, had he lived, he would have filled his poetry 
and his life with new intention. And it is worthy of 
the cry which, closing the last poem in this book, Is 
prophetic of that unconquerable hope for mankind 
which, underlying the greater part of Shelley's poetry, 
has made half its influence upon the world — 

O wind, 
If winter comes, can spring be far behind ? 



NOTE ON THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE. 

This poem is so difficult to understand that I have 
ventured to make the following analysis : — 

It opens with a noble picture of sunrise, filled with 
solemn and stately images, and more disengaged 
from self than any of Shelley's previous work. He 



xlvi " PREFACE. 

then describes himself passing into a waking trance, 
in which he is conscious that in some previous exist- 
ence he has been in the same place, and heard and 
seen the same things. And in that trance he sees a 
Vision. 

He finds himself on a dusty and flowerless road, 
on either side of which is a forest full of sweet 
streams and flowers and lawns, and on the road a 
multitude of folk, old age and youth, and manhood 
and infancy, all hastening onward like a torrent. 
This represents, under the common allegory, the 
ordinary life of men. What kind of life that now 
seemed to Shelley is described in the lines which 
begin — 

" Some flying from the thing they feared," 

but of all this crowd, none, so hurried and so serious 
was their folly, could hear the sweetness of the stream 
or know the beauty of the wood. Nor did any 
understand — and this was the universal condition — 
"whither he went or whence he came, or why he 
made one of the multitude." Life is an inexplicable 
secret, and in the terrible attraction this secret has 
for men and in their failure to solve it, lies the reason 
of the victory Life wins over its victims. In the 
midst of this crowd the Triumph passes by. As the 
throng grew wilder, a cold glare, that obscured 
the sun with a false light, came, and in the glare a 
chariot, and in the chariot. Life, the Conqueror. 
None could see its incommunicable face, double- 
hooded, double-caped, over its head a cloud-like 
crape ; nor its form, crouching like age within the 
car, as one who sat in the shadow of a tomb : while 



PREFACE. xlvii 

the ethereal gloom that poured forth from this dread 
Shape tempered the fierce light in which the chariot 
moved. Every image in this allegorical representa- 
tion tells of the mystery of life, the unfathomable 
riddle that none could penetrate, but which con- 
quered and led all captive. It is this thought which 
is the foundation of the Poem. The deep conceal- 
ment is doubled by the further imagery. The 
Charioteer is a four-faced Shadow — Time itself, 
perhaps, with its three faces that look into the present, 
the past, and the future ; but its eyes are banded so 
that it cannot see while in the service of Life. The 
winged shapes that draw the car are lost to sight in 
thick lightnings. And the Charioteer guides the car 
blindly, so that its course is aimless. Life itself 
knows not where it is conducted. Before the car is 
the wild dance of youth, seeking in tempestuous 
pleasure to find the secret of Life, and outspeeding 
Life ; behind it, the foul and impotent dance of age, 
still cleaving to Life, still limping to reach the glare 
of Life's light ; and the youths and maidens are 
overtaken and trampled by the car of Life into foam 
like the barren sea-foam, and the old sink into cor- 
rupted dust.i These are the common crew who 
have only sought to live according to impulse and 
desires. 

There are others, however, who do not belong to 
the two bands before and behind, but are dragged, 
chained captives, along with the triumphal car. 
These are they who tried to know what Life was, or 

1 The whole of this may be compared with Tennyson's 
Vision of Sin. 



xlviii PREFACE. 

to conquer it ; who labored, but in vain ; who died 
and never knew the secret. 

All those who had grown old in power 
Or misery, all who had their age subdued 
By action or by suffering, 

alike the famous and the infamous. Only a few are 
not seen there, are not captives — the Prophets of 
Mankind, who touched the world with flame, and 
then fled back to their native noon ; who put aside 
the diadem ; who were not victims of Life, because 
they despised all that Life could offer; who con- 
quered its secret by not caring to penetrate it, of 
whom the types were they of Athens and Jerusalem 
— Socrates and Christ. 

In his trance Shelley asks. What is this? And a 
Shape, like an old root by the wayside, who is 
Rousseau^ answers him that it is the pageantry of 
Life's Triumph, and that if Shelley can forbear to 
join the dance — as he does forbear — he will unfold 
that to which this deep scorn — this thing worthy of 
deep scorn — has led him and his companions. 
" Then, if you want further knowledge, follow the 
car ; for me, I am weary, nor would corruption now 
inherit so much of Rousseau 

" if the spark with which Heaven- lit my spirit 
Had been with purer sentiment supplied." 

Who are those chained to the "car? Shelley asks. 
"The wise, the great, the unforgotten," who were 
wise, but did not know themselves. Their love, 
their might, that won for them empire, " could not 



PREFACE, xlix 

repress the mystery within." For at the last, that 
fierce mystery shrouded in the car, Life, and the ques- 
tion what it is, arose in their soul and conquered 
them, and deep night swallowed them. 

Napoleon is then seen, and all the conquerors of 
the world by force of arms or intellect, chained to 
Life's car and vanquished by its scornful secret. I 
myself, speaks Rousseau, was overcome by my own 
heart alone, that nothing in the world could temper 
to its objects 

The course of the vision is here interrupted by two 
speeches of Shelley's, and both of them are meant to 
mark his present apartness from the throng of Life 
and his disdain of those who, through desire of con- 
quest or fame, were slaves to Life. The last of these 
speeches, and Rousseau's answer to it, are steeped in 
Shelley's passionate sense that humanity was but an 
imagery of an eternal Oneness behind it, which, 
reflected in the ever-changing mirror of circumstance 
and nature, made its infinite variety. But all the 
reflections are reflections, nothing more. The same 
thought is in Adonazs, Hi. Here, it is — 

Figures ever new 
Rise on the bubble, paint them as you may ; 
We have but thrown, as those before us threw, 
Our shadows on it as it passed away. 

Then he sees, captives also, "the mighty phantoms 
of an elder day." Plato expiating his too great feel- 
ing of joy and of sorrow, not his own master, whom 
Life conquered at last by love ; Aristotle, Alexander, 

1 How close to truth ! 



1 PREFACE. 

whose conquests the Life of the world finally made 
nought ; the Elder Bards, " who quelled 

" The passions which they sung, as by their strain 
May well be known : their living melody 
Tempers its own contagion to the vein 
Of those who are infected with it." 

Even these, who quelled passions, are captive to Life, 
because they were too curious of the passions, and 
because they knew their work would stir in others 
the passions they themselves subdued. But they are 
of a higher cast than Rousseau, who, like Shelley, 
" suffered what he wrote," and whose words have 
seeds of misery. 

Then the dreamer sees the Emperors of Rome 
and her great Bishops, whose power was given but 
to destroy ; and, sick at heart, turns again to Rous- 
seau (if, as I think, there is no long break here in the 
poem, and the '^ leader " mentioned is still Rousseau 
and not another), and asks him how his course began 
and why. Rousseau then tells his tale and that of 
the pageant ; and portions of the story are so like 
what Shelley has at other times said of his own life, 
that it seems as if he would have partly told his own 
story in the tale that Rousseau tells. Rousseau 
thinks that if Shelley would become actor or victim 
instead of spectator in this wretchedness, and follow 
the Conqueror — 

What thou wouldst be taught I then may learn 
From thee. 

That is, he would learn from Shelley's fate to under- 
stand his own. 



PREFACE. li 

A new phase of the allegory now begins ; the story 
of a single life and its overthrow by Life. Rousseau 
describes himself asleep at the portals of this and 
of the antenatal world, a place here imaged as a 
cavern, through which flows a stream in which all 
things are forgotten. All those who are in the 
pageant of life have also been, as we understand at 
the end, asleep in this oblivious valley. When he 
arose into being, in infancy, he says that all things 
around kept the trace of some diviner light than that 
of earth, and melodies that confused the sense of 
earthly things were heard. This is the half Platonic 
conception of reminiscence. Boyhood comes, imaged 
by the brightness of morning that floods the cavern, 
and then, a Shape all light stood before him, flinging 
freshness, and in her hand a cup of nepenthe. It is 
the Spirit of the aspirations and dreams of youth, the 
vision of Beauty Shelley saw, the Vision which, in 
different forms, all the creators see. She leads the 
youth forth out of the cave, and as he follows her all 
his thoughts were strewn under her feet like embers, 
and, thought by thought, she quenched them, and 
all that was, seemed, as he gazed, as if it had been 
not. That is the swift succession of aspiration, 
thought, and feeling, each dying as its successor is 
born, which we know when we are young, and the 
sense, then also ours, of all the outward world becom- 
ing, in the pursuit of the ideal, as if it had no real 
being. At last the mystery of life which cannot be 
repressed, begins to stir within the youth. He can 
no longer resist the fatal question all must ask, and 
• — " Show whence I came, he crios, and where I am, 



lii PREFACE. 

and why." "Arise and quench thy thirst," the Shape 
rephes ; and as he drank the cup, this Dream of 
youth grew dim, and her light — a light of heaven 
that hereafter glimmered only, forever sought again, 
forever lost — waned in the glare of the Masque of 
Life that now rushed through the forest. It is the 
entrance into manhood, life as it is in the world of 
action. He sees — and it seems the answer to his 
question — the car in which Life itself is borne, its 
captives, and those who played, or gazed; or fol- 
lowed, or out-speeded the car — all as yet young. 
He himself plunges into "the thickest billows of 
that living storm," but before the chariot had be- 
gun to climb the steep of middle age a new wonder 
grew. 

The weariness, the cruel working of life's secret, 
begins to exhaust and destroy all the pleasure, all the 
eagerness, with which men at the first follow the 
chariot of Life. The way in which Shelley images 
this change, and the cause he assigns for it are as 
imaginative as they are original. Shadows began to 
people the grove, dense flocks of phantoms, of vari- 
ous quality and shape, who hid in the capes of kings, 
and rode across the tiara of popes ; and some were 
old anatomies that hatched broods, and whose dead 
eyes took power and gave it to those who ruined 
earth ; and some fell like flashes of discolored snow- 
on the bosoms of the young and were melted by the 
glow which they extinguished ; and others, like small 
gnats, thronged about the brows of lawyer, states- 
man, priest, and theorist. Shelley invents all kinds 
of them, and each has its meaning. These are the 



PREFACE. liii 

thoughts, written or spoken, the work and the pas- 
sions of men ; all that men have poured forth from 
their hearts or impressed upon the world ; the old 
theologies, the old doctrines of kingcraft whose dead 
eyes have power ; the political theories, poetry, phil- 
osophies, which have been sent forth from the begin- 
ning of humanity, but which poured forth so fast and 
furious before the Revolution. Rousseau knows 
whence they came. " Each one 

" Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly 
These shadows." 

Shadows as they were, form was given them by the 
creative rays of the car, for all the thoughts and feel- 
ings of men are moulded by the mystery of life. And 
so moulded, and darkening all the ways of the pageant 
with the sense of the deep mystery that gave them 
shape, they did their work, and hour by hour the 
unconquerable secret, embodied in the forms given 
to it by the infinite questioning of men, destroyed 
its victims. 

From every form the beauty slowly waned ; 
From every firmest limb and fairest face 
The strength and freshness fell Uke dust — 

And long before the day of life 

Was old, the joy which waked like heaven's glance 
The sleepers in the oblivious valley died ; 
And some grew weary of the ghastly dance, 
And fell as I have fallen, by the wayside ; — 

And those fell soonest who had done most creative 
work ; who had thought and felt and expressed the 



liv PRE FA CE. 

most — the more passionate, whether for good or 



Those soonest from whose forms most shadows passed, 
And least of strength and beauty did abide. 
" Then what is Life? " I cried. 

And with that cry all that Shelley wrote *s '^nded. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty . . . . i 

The Poet's Philosophy 4 

The Poet's World 5 

Alastor 6 

The Two Spirits. An Allegory . . . .32 

Lines 34 

Poems on Death : — 

A Summer Evening Churchyard . . -36 
Sonnet ........ 37 

Sonnet 38 

Peace 38 

"The Babe is at Peace" . » . . . 38 
The Dirge of Ginevra . . . . -39 
The Dirge of Beatrice , .... 40 
Sleep and Death ..,,.. 40 

Iv 



Ivi CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

" Songs Consecrate to Liberty " — 

To Wordsworth ....... 42 

The Snake and Eagle . . . . .42 

The Mask of Anarchy ..... 48 

Song 54 

Sonnet • • • 55 

Sonnet 56 

Ode to Liberty 56 

Poems on Time and its Changes — 

Ozymandias ....... 67 

Time 67 

The Seasons 68 

Spring 69 

June . 70 

Summer and Winter 71 

Autumn 71 

Dirge for the Year 72 

Mutability . . ... . . . .73 

To-morrow ........ 74 

Lines ......... 75 

The Past 75 

Time Long Past 75 

Lines 76 

Songs of Love — 

Love's Philosophy 78 

From the Arabic . . , o . . 78 



CONTENTS. 



Ivii 



Songs of Love, continued — 
The Indian Serenade 

To . 

Song for " Tasso ' 

Love Left Alone 

A Song 

Love and Parting 

To F. G. . 

Fiordispina 

To Night . 

A Bridal Song . 



79 
80 
80 
81 
82 
83 
85 
85 
87 



Julian and Maddalo — A Conversation 



89 



Poems of Nature and Man — 

Mont Blanc. Lines written in the Vale of 

Chamouni in 

The Alps at Dawn 116 

Lines written among the Euganean Hills , 117 

The World's Wanderers 129 

To the Moon 129 

Stanzas. Written in Dejection, near Naples . 130 

A Fragment ....... 131 

The Forest at Evening 132 

Italy and Sorrow 133 

The Zucca . I34 

To a Skylark . . / . . . -137 

The Nightingale . . , , . .141 



Iviii 



CONTENTS. 



Poems of Nature and Man, continued — 
The Woodman and the Nightingale 
The Tower of Famine 
Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa 
"And like a Dying Lady" 
"When Soft Winds" 



141 
144 

145 
146 
146 



Poems of Pure Nature — 








Passage of the Apennines . . . .147 


The Cloud .... 




147 


The Dawn 






150 


Dawn and Desire . 






151 


Twilight and Desire 






151 


All Sustaining Love 






152 


Song of Spirits 






153 


Hymn to Asia . 






154 


Echo Song to Asia . 






156 


The Spirits of the Earth and the A 


loon 


157 


The Moon and the Earth 




162 


The Music of the Woods 


, 




166 



Classic Poems of Nature — 

Hymn of Apollo 1 70 

Hymn of Pan 1 71 

The Birth of Pleasure 173 

Arethusa . 173 

Song of Proserpine. While gathering flowers 

on the Plain of Enna . , . . 17^ 



CONTENTS. lix 

PAGE 

Poems of Home Life — 

To Mary Shelley 178 

To William Shelley 178 

To William Shelley . . . . . .179 

Letter to Maria Gisborne . . . .180 

The Aziola 190 

The Boat on the Serchio .... 191 

The Witch of Atlas. To Mary . . .195 

The Witch of Atlas 197 

The Question 220 

To Emilia Viviani 222 

Epipsychidion. Verses addressed to the noble and 
unfortunate Lady Emilia Viviani, now im- 
prisoned in the Convent of St. Anne, Pisa . . 223 

Fragment 244 

Poems to Liberty, Greece, and Italy — 

Ode to Naples 245 

Greece to Slavery 252 

Chorus 252 

Chorus 254 

Chorus 256 

The New World 257 

"Life May Change" .261 



Ix CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

The Sensitive Plant . . . ' . . . 262 

Last Love Poems — 

To Edward Williams 274 

Song 276 

A Lament 278 

A Dirge 278 

To 279 

Lines . . . . . . . . 279 

To 280 

With a Guitar, to Jane 281 

To Jane — The Invitation .... 284 

To Jane — The Recollection .... 286 

Remembrance 289 

Lines written in the Bay of Lerici . . . 290 

To 292 

Adonais; — An Elegy on the death of John Keats 293 

Ode to the West Wind 314 

Notes 317 

Index of First Lines 333 



POEMS FROM SHELLEY 



HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 

The awful shadow of some unseen Power 
Floats tho' unseen amongst us, — visiting 
This various world with as inconstant wing 
As summer winds that creep from flow^er to flower, — 
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain 
shower, 
It visits with inconstant glance 
Each human heart and countenance ; 
Like hues and harmonies of evening, — 

Like clouds in starlight widely spread, — 
Like memory of music fled, — 
Like aught that for its grace may be 
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. 

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate 

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon 

Of human thought or form, — where art thou gone? 

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, 

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? 
Ask why the sunlight not for ever 
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river, 

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, 
Why fear and dream and death and birth 
Cast on the daylight of this earth 
Such gloom, — why man has such a scope 

For love and hate, despondency and hope ? 



2 HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever 
To sage or poet these responses given — 
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and 
Heaven, 
Remain the records of their vain endeavor. 
Frail spells — whose uttered charm might not avail to 
sever, 
From all we hear and all we see. 
Doubt, chance, and mutability. 
Thy light alone — like mist o^er mountains driven, 
Or music by the night wind sent, 
Thro' strings of some still instrument, 
Or moonlight on a midnight stream. 
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. 

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart 
And come, for some uncertain moments lent. 
Man were immortal, and omnipotent. 
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his 
heart. 
Thou messenger of sympathies. 
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes — 
Thou — that to human thought art nourishment. 



Like darkness to a dying flame 



Depart not as thy shadow came. 
Depart not — lest the grave should be, 
Like life and fear, a dark reality. 

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped 
Thro' many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, 
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing 

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. 



HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. 3 

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is 
fed, 

I was not heard — I saw them not — 

When musing deeply on the lot 
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing 

All vital things that wake to bring 

News of birds and blossoming, — 

Sudden, thy shadow fell on me ; 
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! 

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 

To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow? 
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even 
now 
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours 
Each from his voiceless grave : they have in visioned 
bowers 
Of studious zeal or love''s delight 
Outwatched with me the envious night — 
They know that never joy illumed my brow 
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free 
This world from its dark slavery, 
That thou — O awful Loveliness, 
Wouldst give whatever these words cannot express. 

The day becomes more solemn and serene 
When noon is past — there is a harmony 
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 
Which thro^ the summer is not heard or seen, 
As if it could not be, as if it had not been! 
Thus let thy power, which like the truth 
Of nature on my passive youth 



4 THE POET'S PHILOSOPHY. 

Descended, to my onward life supply 

Its calm — to one who worships thee, 
And every form containing thee, 
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind 

To fear himself, and love all human kind. 



[8i6. 



THE POET'S PHILOSOPHY. 

[We] look on that which cannot change — the One, 

The unborn and the undying. Earth and Ocean, 

Space, and the isles of life or light that gem 

The sapphire floods of interstellar air. 

This firmament pavilioned upon chaos, 

With all its cressets of immortal fire, 

Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably 

Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them 

As Calpe the Atlantic clouds — this Whole 

Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers, 

With all the silent or tempestuous workings 

By which they have been, are, or cease to be. 

Is but a vision ; all that it inherits 

Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams ; 

Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less 

The future and the past are idle shadows 

Of thought's eternal flight — they have no being: 

Nought is but that which feels itself to be. 

Hellas. 



THE POET'S WORLD. 



THE POET'S WORLD. 

On a poet's lips I slept 

Dreaming like a love-adept 

In the sound his breathing kept ; 

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, 

But feeds on the aerial kisses 

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. 

He will watch from dawn to gloom 

The lake-reflected sun illume 

The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, 

Nor heed nor see what things they be ; 

But from these create he can 

Forms more real than living man, 

Nurslings of immortality ! 

Projuetheus Unbound. 



" Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, 
amans amare." — Confess. St, Aitgitstine. 

The poem entitled "Alastor" may be considered as 
allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the 
human mind. It represents a youth of uncorrupted feelings 
and adventurous genius, led forth, by an imagination in- 
flamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excel- 
lent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He 
drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insa- 
tiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world 
sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords 
to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long 
as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus 
infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self- 
possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease 
to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened, and 
thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He 
images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with 
speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the 
vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all 
of wonderful or wise or beautiful which the poet, the philoso- 
pher, or the lover, could depicture. The intellectual faculties, 
the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective 
requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other 
human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these 
requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks 
in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his dis- 
appointment, he descends to an untimely grave. 

The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The 
6 



ALA ST OR. 7 

Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the Furies of an 
irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that 
power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden 
darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite 
a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous 
decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. 
Their destiny is more abject and inglorious, as their delin- 
quency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, 
deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst 
of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, 
loving nothing on this earth, and cherishmg no hopes beyond, 
yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing 
neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, 
and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They lan- 
guish, because none feel with them their common nature. 
They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, 
nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their 
country. Among those who attempt to exist without human 
sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish, through the 
intensity and passion of their search after its communities 
when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. 
All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multi- 
tudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting mis- 
ery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their 
fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old 
age a miserable grave. 

" The good die first, 

And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, 

Burn to the socket! " 



Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood ! 

If our great Mother has imbued my soul 

With aught of natural piety to feel 

Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; 

If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, 

With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, 



8 ALA ST OR; OR, 

And solemn midnight's tingling silentness ; 
If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, 
And winter robing with pure snow and crowns 
Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs ; 
If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes 
Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me ; 
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast 
I consciously have injured, but still loved 
And cherished these my kindred ; then forgive 
This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw 
No portion of your wonted favor now ! 

Mother of this unfathomable world ! 
Favor my solemn song, for I have loved 
Thee ever, and thee only ; I have watched 
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, 
And my heart ever gazes on the depth 
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed 
In charnels and on coffins, where black death 
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee. 
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings 
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost 
Thy messenger, to render up the tale 
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours. 
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, 
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist 
Staking his very life on some dark hope. 
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks 
With my most innocent love, until strange tears 
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made 
Such magic as compels the charmed night 
To render up thy charge : . . . and, though ne'er yet 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. 9 

ihou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, 

Enough from incommunicable dream, 

And twiliglit phantasms, and deep noonday thought, 

Has shone within me, that serenely now 

And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre 

Suspended in the solitary dome 

Of some mysterious and deserted fane, 

I wait thy breath. Great Parent, that my strain 

May modulate with murmurs of the air, 

And motions of the forests and the sea, 

And voice of living beings, and woven hymns 

Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. 

There was a Poet whose untimely tomb 
No human hands with pious reverence reared, 
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds 
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid 
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness : — 
A lovely youth, — no mourning maiden decked 
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, 
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep : — 
Gentle, and brave, and generous, no lorn bard 
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh : 
He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. 
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, 
And virgins, as unknown he past, have pined 
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes. 
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn, 
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, 
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell. 

By solemn vision, and bright silver dream, 
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight 



lO ALA ST OR; OR, 

And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, 

Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. 

The fountains of divine philosophy 

Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, 

Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past 

In truth or fable consecrates, he felt 

And knew. When early youth had past, he left 

His cold fireside and alienated home 

To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. 

Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness 

Has lured his fearless steps ; and he has bought 

With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men, 

His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps 

He like her shadow has pursued, where'er 

The red volcano overcanopies 

Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice 

With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes 

On black bare pointed islets ever beat 

With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves 

Rugged and dark, winding among the springs 

Of fire and poison, inaccessible 

To avarice or pride, their starry domes 

Of diamond and of gold expand above 

Numberless and immeasurable hails. 

Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines 

Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite. 

Nor had that scene of ampler majesty 

Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven 

And the green earth lost in his heart its claims 

To love and wonder ; he would linger long 

In lonesome vales, making the wild his home. 

Until the doves and squirrels would partake 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. ii 

I^ rom his innocuous hand his bloodless food, 
Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks, 
And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er 
The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend 
Her timid steps to gaze upon a form 
More graceful than her own. 

His wandering step 
Obedient to high thoughts, has visited 
The awful ruins of the days of old : 
Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste 
Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers 
Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, 
Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange 
Sculptured on alabaster obelisk, 
Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx, 
Dark ^Ethiopia in her desert hills 
Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, 
Stupendous columns, and wild images 
Of more than man, where marble daemons watch 
The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men 
Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, 
He lingered, poring on memorials 
Of the world's youth, through the long burning day 
Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the 

moon 
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades 
Suspended he that task, but ever gazed 
And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind 
Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw 
The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. 



12 ALA ST OR; OR, 

Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food, 
Her daily portion, from her father's tent. 
And spread her matting for his couch, and stole 
From duties and repose to tend his steps : — 
Enamored, yet not daring for deep awe 
To speak her love : — and watched his nightly sleep, 
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips 
Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath 
Of innocent dreams arose : then, when red morn 
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home 
Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned. 

The Poet wandering on, through Arable 
And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste. 
And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down 
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, 
In joy and exultation held his way; 
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within 
Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine 
Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower. 
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched 
His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep 
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet 
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid 
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. 
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul 
Heard in the calm of thought ; its music long. 
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held 
His inmo.st sense suspended in its web 
Of many-colored woof and shifting hues. 
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, 
And lofty hopes of divine liberty, 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. 13 

Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, 

Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood 

Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame 

A permeating fire ; wild numbers then 

She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs 

Subdued by its own pathos : her fair hands 

Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp 

Strange symphony, and in their branching veins 

The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale. 

The beating of her heart was heard to fill 

The pauses of her music, and her breath 

Tumultuously accorded with those fits 

Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose, 

As if her heart impatiently endured 

Its bursting burthen : at the sound he turned, 

And saw by the warm light of their own life 

Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil 

Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare, 

Her dark locks floating in the breath of night, 

Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips 

Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. 

His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess 

Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled 

His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet 

Her panting bosom : . . . she drew back a while. 

Then, yielding to the irresistible joy. 

With frantic gesture and short breathless cry 

Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. 

Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night 

Involved and swallowed up the vision ; sleep, 

Like a dark flood suspended in its course, 

Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain. 



14 ALA ST OR; OR, 

Roused by the shock he started from his trance — 
Jhe cold white light of morning, the blue moon 
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, 
The distinct valley and the vacant woods, 
Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled 
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower 
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep, 
The mystery and the majesty of Earth, 
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes 
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly 
As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven. 
The spirit of sweet human love has sent 
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned 
Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues 
Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade ; 
He overleaps the bound. Alas! alas! 
Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined 
Thus treacherously ? Lost, lost, for ever lost, 
In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, 
That beautiful shape ! Does the dark gate of death 
Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, 
O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds, 
And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake, 
Lead only to a black and watery depth, 
While death's blue vault, with loathhest vapors hung, 
Where every shade which the foul grave exhales 
Hides its dead eye from the detested day. 
Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms ? 
This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart, 
The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung 
His brain even like despair. 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. 15 

While day-light held 
The sky, the Poet kept mute conference 
With his still soul. At night the passion came, 
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream. 
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth 
Into the darkness. — As an eagle grasped 
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast 
Burn with the poison, and precipitates 
Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud, 
Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight 
O'er the wide aery wilderness : thus driven 
By the bright shadow of that lovely dream, 
Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night. 
Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells, 
Startling with careless step the moon-light snake. 
He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight. 
Shedding the mockery of its vital hues 
Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on 
Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep 
Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud ; 
Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs 
Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind 
Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on, 
Day after day, a weary waste of hours. 
Bearing within his life the brooding care 
That ever fed on its decaying flame. 
And now his limbs were lean ; his scattered hair 
Sered by the autumn of strange sufl"ering 
Sung dirges in the wind ; his listless hand 
Hung like dead bone within its withered skin ; 
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone 
As in a furnace burning secretly 



1 6 ALASTOR; OR, 

From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers, 

Who ministered with human charity 

His human wants, beheld with wondering awe 

Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer, 

Encountering on some dizzy precipice 

That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind 

With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet 

Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused 

In its career : the infant would conceal 

His troubled visage in his mother's robe 

In terror at the glare of those wild eyes. 

To remember their strange light in many a dream 

Of after-times ; but youthful maidens, taught 

By nature, would interpret half the woe 

That wasted him, would call him with false names 

Brother, and friend, would press his pallid hand 

At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path 

Of his departure from their father's door. 

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore 
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste 
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged 
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there. 
Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds. 
It rose as he approached, and with strong wings 
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course 
High over the immeasurable main. 
His eyes pursued its flight. — " Thou hast a home^ 
Beautiful bird ; thou voyagest to thine home. 
Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck 
With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes 
Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy. 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. ij 

And what am I that I should linger here, 

With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, 

Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned 

To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers 

In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven 

That echoes not my thoughts? " A gloomy smile 

Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips. 

For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly 

Its precious charge, and silent death exposed, 

Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure, 

With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. 

Startled by his own thoughts he looked around. 
There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight 
Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind. 
A little shallop floating near the shore 
Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze. 
It had been long abandoned, for its sides 
Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints 
Swayed with the undulations of the tide. 
A restless impulse urged him to embark 
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste ; 
For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves 
The slimy caverns of the populous deep. 

The day was fair and sunny, sea and sky 
Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind 
Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. 
Following his eager soul, the wanderer 
Leaped in the boat, he spread his cloak aloft 
On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat, 



1 8 ALA ST OR; OR, 

And felt the boat speed o'er the tranquil sea 
Like a torn cloud before the hurricane. 

As one that in a silver vision floats 
Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds 
Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly 
Along the dark and ruffled waters fled 
The straining boat. — A whirlwind swept it on, 
With fierce gusts and precipitating force, 
Through the white ridges of the chafed sea. 
The waves arose. Higher and higher still 
Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest' 

scourge 
Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp. 
Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war 
Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast 
Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven 
With dark obliterating course, he sate : 
As if their genii were the ministers 
Appointed to conduct him to the light 
Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate 
Holding the steady helm. Evening came on. 
The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues 
High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray 
That canopied his path o'er the waste deep ; 
Twilight, ascending slowly from the east, 
Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks 
O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day ; 
Night followed, clad with stars. On every side 
More horribly the multitudinous streams 
Of ocean's mountainous waste to mutual war 
Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. 19 

The calm and spangled sky. The little boat 
Still fled before the storm ; still fled, like foam 
Down the steep cataract of a wintry river ; 
Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave ; 
Now leaving far behind the bursting mass 
That fell, convulsing ocean: safely fled — 
As if that frail and wasted human form, 
Had been an elemental god. 

At midnight 
The moon arose : and lo ! the ethereal cliffs 
Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone 
Among the stars like sunlight, and around 
Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves 
Bursting and eddying irresistibly 
Rage and resound for ever. — Who shall save? — 
The boat fled on, — the boiling torrent drove, 
The crags closed round with black and jagged arms, 
The shattered mountain overhung the sea, 
And faster still, beyond all human speed. 
Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave, 
The little boat was driven. A cavern there 
Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths 
Ingulfed the rushing sea. The boat fled on 
With unrelaxing speed. — "Vision and love ! " 
The Poet cried aloud, "I have beheld 
The path of thy departure. Sleep and death 
Shall not divide us long ! " 

The boat pursued 
The windings of the cavern. Day-light shone 
At length upon that gloomy river's flow ; 



20 ALA ST OR; OR, 

Now, where the fiercest war among the waves 

Is calm, on the unfathomable stream 

The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven, 

Exposed those black depths to the azure sky, 

Ere yet the flood's enormous volume fell 

Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound 

That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass 

Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm ; 

Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, 

Circling immeasurably fast, and laved 

With alternating dash the gnarled roots 

Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms 

In darkness over it. V the midst was left. 

Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud, 

A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm. 

Seized by the sway of the ascending stream, 

With dizzy swiftness, round, and round, and iround, "^ 

Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose. 

Till on the verge of the extremest curve, 

Where, through an opening of the rocky bank. 

The waters overflow, and a smooth spot 

Of glassy quiet mid those battHng tides 

Is left, the boat paused shuddering. — Shall it sink 

Down the abyss ? — Shall the reverting stress 

Of that resistless gulf embosom it ? 

Now shall it fall ? — A wandering stream of wind. 

Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail, 

And, lo ! with gentle motion, between banks 

Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream, 

Beneath a woven grove it sails, and, hark ! 

The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar. 

With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods. 



THE SPIRIT OF SOIITUDE. 21 

Where the embowering trees recede, and leave 

A little space of green expanse, the cove 

Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers 

For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes, 

Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave 

Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task, 

Which nought but vagrant bird, or wanton wind, 

Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay 

Had e'er disturbed before. The Poet longed 

To deck with their bright hues his withered hair, 

But on his heart its solitude returned. 

And he forbore. Not the strong impulse hid 

In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame 

Had yet performed its ministry : it hung 

Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud 

Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods 

Of night close over it. 

The noonday sun 
Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass 
Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence 
A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves. 
Scooped in the dark base of their aery rocks 
Mocking its moans, respond and roar for ever. 
The meeting boughs and implicated leaves 
Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as led 
By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death, 
He sought in Nature's dearest haunt, some bank, 
Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark 
And dark the shades accumulate. The oak, 
Expanding its immense and knotty arms, 
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids 



2 2 ALASTOR; OK, 

Of the tall cedar overarching, frame 

Most solemn domes within, and far below, 

Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, 

The ash and the acacia floating hang 

Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed 

In rainbow and ia fire, the parasites, 

Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around 

The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes. 

With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, 

Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, 

These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs 

Uniting their close union ; the woven leaves 

Make net-work of the dark blue light of day, 

And the nighfs noontide clearness, mutable 

As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns 

Beneath these canopies extend their swells, 

Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms 

Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen 

Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with 

jasmine, 
A soul-dissolving odor, to invite 
To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell, 
Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep 
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades. 
Like vaporous shapes half seen ; beyond, a well, 
Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave, 
Images all the woven boughs above. 
And each depending leaf, and every speck 
Of azure sky, darting between their chasms ; 
Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves 
Its portraiture, but some inconstant star 
Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair, 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. 23 

Or, painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, 
Or gorgeous insect floating motionless. 
Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings 
Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. 

Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld 
Their own wan light through the reflected lines 
Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth 
Of that still fountain ; as the human heart, 
Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave, 
Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard 
The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprung 
Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel 
An unaccustomed presence, and the sound 
Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs 
Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed 
To stand beside him — clothed in no bright robes 
Of shadowy silver or enshrining light. 
Borrowed from aught the visible world affords 
Of grace, or majesty, or mystery ; — 
But, undulating woods, and silent well, 
And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom 
Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming^ 
Held commune with him, as if he and it 
Were all that was, — only . . . when his regard 
Was raised by intense pensiveness, . . . two eyes, 
Two starry eyes hung in the gloom of thought. 
And seemed with their serene and azure smiles 
To beckon him. 

Obedient to the light 
That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing 
The windings of the dell. — The rivulet 



24 ALA ST OR; OR, 

Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine 
Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell 
Among the moss with hollow harmony 
Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones 
It danced ; like childhood laughing as it went : 
Then, through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept, 
Reflecting every herb and drooping bud 
That overhung its quietness. — " O stream ! 
Whose source is inaccessibly profound, 
Whither do thy mysterious waters tend ? 
Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, 
Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs, 
Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course 
Have each their type in me : and the wide sky, 
And measureless ocean may declare as soon 
What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud 
Contains thy waters, as the universe 
Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched 
Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste 
r the passing wind! " 

Beside the grassy shore 
Of the small stream he went; he did impress 
On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught 
Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one 
Roused by some joyous madness from the couch 
Of fever, he did move ; yet, not like him. 
Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame 
Of his frail exultation shall be spent, 
He must descend. With rapid steps he went 
Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flow 
Of the wild babbling rivulet ; and now 



THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE. 25 

The forest's solemn canopies were changed 
For the uniform and lightsome evening sky. 
Gray rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed 
The struggling brook : tall spires of windlestrae 
Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope, 
And nought but gnarled roots of ancient pines 
Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots 
The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here. 
Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away, 
The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin 
And white, and where irradiate dewy eyes 
Had shone, gleam stony orbs : — so from his steps 
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade 
Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds 
And musical motions. Calm, he still pursued 
The stream, that with a larger volume now 
Rolled through the labyrinthine dell ; and there 
Fretted a path through its descending curves 
With its wintry speed. On every side now rose 
Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms, 
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles 
In the light of evening, and its precipice 
Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above, 
'Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves. 
Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues 
To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands 
Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, 
And seems, with its accumulated crags, 
To overhang the world : for wide expand 
Beneath the wan stars and descending moon 
Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, 
Dim tracts and vast, robed in the liistrous gloom 



2 6 ALAS TO J?; OR, 

Of leaden-colored even, and fiery hills 

Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge 

Of the remote horizon. The near scene, 

In naked and severe simplicity, 

Made contrast with the universe. A pine, 

Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy 

Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast 

Yielding one only response, at each pause 

In most familiar cadence, with the howl, 

The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams 

Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river, 

Foaming and hurrying o'er its rugged path. 

Fell into that immeasurable void 

Scattering its waters to the passing winds. 

Yet the gray precipice and solemn pine 
And torrent, were not all ; one silent nook 
Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain, 
Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks. 
It overlooked in its serenity 
The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars. 
It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile 
Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped 
The fissured stones with its entwining arms. 
And did embower with leaves for ever green. 
And berries dark, the smooth and even space 
Of its inviolated floor, and here 
The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore. 
In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay, 
Red, yellow, or ethereally pale. 
Rivals the pride of summer. 'Tis the haunt 
Of every gentle wdnd, whose breath can teach 



THE SPIRIT OF SOUTUDE. 27 

The wilds to love' tranquillity. One step, 

One human slep alone, has ever broken 

The stillness of its solitude ; — one voice 

Alone inspired its echoes ; — even that voice 

Which hither came, floating among the winds, 

And led the loveliest among human forms 

To make their wild haunts the depository 

Of all the grace and beauty that endued 

Its motions, render up its majesty, 

Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm, 

And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould, 

Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss, 

Commit the colors of that varying cheek, 

That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes. 

The dim and horned moon hung low, and poured 
A sea of lustre on the horizon's verge 
That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist 
Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank 
Wan moonlight even to fulness : not a star 
Shone, not a sound was heard ; the very winds. 
Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice 
Slept, clasped in his embrace. — O, storm of death ! 
Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night : 
And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still 
Guiding its irresistible career 
In thy devastating omnipotence. 
Art king of this frail world, from the red field 
Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital. 
The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed 
Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, 
A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls 



28 ALAS TOR; OR, 

His brother Death. A rare and regal prey 
He hath prepared, prowling around the world ; 
Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men 
Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms, 
Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine 
The unheeded tribute of a broken heart. 

When on the threshold of the green recess 
The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death 
Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled. 
Did he resign his high and holy soul 
To images of the majestic past, 
That paused within his massive being now, 
Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe 
Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place 
His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk 
Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone 
Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest 
Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink 
Of that obscurest chasm ; — and thus he lay, 
Surrendering to their final impulses 
The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair, 
The torturers, slept ; no mortal pain or fear 
Marred his repose, the influxes of sense, 
And his own being unalloyed by pain, 
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed 
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there 
At peace, and faintly smiling : — his last sight 
Was the great moon, which o'er the western line 
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended. 
With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed 
To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills 



THE SPIRIT OF SOIITUDE. 29 

It rests, and still as the divided frame 

Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood, 

That ever beat in mystic sympathy 

With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still : 

And when two lessening points of light alone 

Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp 

Of his faint respiration scarce did stir 

The stagnate night : — till the minutest ray 

Wa? quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart. 

It paused — it fluttered. But when heaven remained 

Utterly black, the murky shades involved 

An image, silent, cold, and motionless, 

As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. 

Even as a vapor fed with golden beams 

That ministered on sunlight, ere the west 

Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame — 

No sense, no motion, no divinity — 

A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings 

The breath of heaven did wander — a bright stream 

Once fed with many-voiced waves — a dream 

Of youth, which night and time have quenched for 

ever, 
Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now. 

O, for Medea's wondrous alchemy. 
Which wheresoever it fell made the earth gleam 
With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale 
From vernal blooms fresh fragrance ! O, that God, 
Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice 
Which but one living man has drained, who now, 
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels 
No proud exemption in the blighting curse 



30 ALA ST OR; OR, 

He bears, over the world wanders for ever, 

Lone as incarnate death ! O, that the dream 

Of dark magician in his visioned cave, 

Raking the cinders of a crucible 

For life and power, even when his feeble hand 

Shakes in its last decay, were the tme law 

Of this so lovely world ! But thou art fled 

Like some frail exhalation ; which the dawn 

Robes in its golden beams, — ah ! thou hast fled ! 

The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful, 

The child of grace and genius. Heartless things 

Are done and said i' the world, and many worms 

And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth 

From sea and mountain, city and wilderness, 

In vesper low or joyous orison, 

Lifts still its solemn voice : — but thou art fled — 

Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes 

Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee 

Been purest ministers, who are, alas ! 

Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips 

So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes 

That image sleep in death, upon that form 

Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear 

Be shed — not even in thought. Nor, when those 

hues 
Are gone, and those divinest lineaments, 
Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone 
In the frail pauses of this simple strain, 
Let not high verse, mourning the memory 
Of that which is no more, or painting's woe 
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery 
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence. 



THE SPIRrr OF SOLITUDE. 31 

And all the shows o' the world are frail and vain 
To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade. 
It is a woe too '' deep for tears," when all 
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, 
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves 
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, 
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope : 
But pale despair and cold tranquillity. 
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, 
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. 

1815. 



32 THE TWO SPIRITS. 



THE TWO SPIRITS. 

gin ^Ikgorg. 

First Spirit. 

O THOU, who plumed with strong desire 
Wouldst float above the earth, beware ! 
A Shadow tracks thy flight of fire — 
Night is coming ! 
Bright are the regions of the air, 
And among the winds and beams 
It were delight to wander there — 
Night is coming ! 

I 

Second Spirit. 

The deathless stars are bright above ; 
If I would cross the shade of night, 
Within my heart is the lamp of love, 
And that is day ! 
And the moon will smile with gentle light 
On my golden plumes where'er they move ; 
The meteors will linger round my flight. 
And make night day. 



THE TWO SPIRITS. 33 



First Spirit. 

But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken 

Hail, and lightning, and stormy rain ; 
See, the bounds of the air are shaken — 
Night is coming ! 
The red swift clouds of the hurricane 
Yon declining sun have overtaken, 
The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain — 
Night is coming ! 

Second Spirit. 

I see the light, and I hear the sound ; 

I'll sail on the flood of the tempest dark, 
With the calm within and the light around 
Which makes night day : 
And thou, when the gloom is deep and stark, 
Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound. 
My moon-light flight thou then may'st mark 
On high, far away. 



Some say there is a precipice 

Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin 
O'er piles of snow and chasms of ice 
'Mid Alpine mountains ; 
And that the languid storm pursuing 
That winged shape, for ever flies 

Round those hoar branches, aye renewing 
Its aery fountains. 



34 LINES. 

Some say when nights are dry and clear, 

And the death-dews sleep on the morass, 
Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller, 
Which make night day : 
And a silver shape like his early love doth pass 
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair, 
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass, 
He finds night day. 

l820„ 



LINES. 

The cold earth slept below ; 
Above the cold sky shone ; 
And all around, 
With a chilling sound. 
From caves of ice and fields of snow, 
The breath of night like death did flow 
Beneath the sinking moon. 

The wintry hedge was black. 
The green grass was not seen. 
The birds did rest 
On the bare thorn's breast, 
Whose roots, beside the pathway track. 
Had bound their folds o'er man}- a crack 
Which the frost had made between. 



LINES. 35 

Thine eyes glowed in the glare 
Of the moon's dying light ; 
As a fen-fire's beam, 
On a sluggish stream, 
Gleams dimly — so the moon shone there, 
And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair 
That shook in the wind of night. 

The moon made thy lips pale, beloved ; 
The wind made thy bosom chill ; 
The night did shed 
On thy dear head 
Its frozen dew, and thou didst He 
Where the bitter breath of the naked sky 
Might visit thee at will. 

1815. 



^oems on JBeatlj. 



A SUMMER EVENING CHURCHYARD. 

LECHLADE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. 

The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere 
Each vapor that obscured the sunset's ray ; 
And paUid evening twines its beaming hair 
In duskier braids around the languid eyes of day : 
Silence and twilight, unbeloved of men, 
Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen. 

They breathe their spells towards the departing day, 
Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea; 
Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway, 
Responding to the charm with its own mystery. 
The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass 
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass. 

Thou too, aerial Pile ! whose pinnacles 
Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire, 
Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells. 
Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire, 
Around whose lessening and invisible height 
Gather among the stars the clouds of night. 

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres : 
And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound 
36 



POEMS ON DEATH. 37 

Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs, 
Breathed from their wormy beds all living things 

around. 
And mingling with the still night and mute sky 
Its awful hush is felt inaudibly. 

Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild 

And terrorless as this serenest night : 

Here could I hope, like some enquiring child 

Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human 

sight 
Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep 
That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep. 

1815. 



SONNET. 

Ye hasten to the dead ! What seek ye there, 

Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes 

Of the idle brain, which the world's livery wear? 

O thou quick Heart which pantest to possess 

All that anticipation feigneth fair ! 

Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess 

Whence thou didst come, and whither thou mayst go, 

And that which never yet was known wouldst know — 

Oh, whither hasten ye that thus ye press 

With such swift feet life's green and pleasant path, 

Seeking alike from happiness and woe 

A refuge in the cavern of gray death ? 

O heart, and mind, and thoughts ! What thing do y ^'^ 

Hope to inheritjn the grave below 1 

182 



/ 



38 POEMS ON DEATH. 



SONNET. 

Lift not the painted veil which those who live 
Call Life : though unreal shapes be pictured there, 
And it but mimic all we would believe 
With colors idly spread, — behind, lurk Fear 
And Hope, twin destinies ; who ever weave 
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear. 
I knew one who had lifted it — he sought, 
For his lost heart was tender, things to love, 
But found them not, alas ! nor was there aught 
The world contains, the which he could approve. 
Through the unheeding many he did move, 
A splendor among shadows, a bright blot 
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove 
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not. 

1818? 



PEACE. 

The rude wind is singing, 
The dirge of the music dead, 

The cold worms are clinging 
Where kisses were lately fed. 



The babe is at peace within the womb, 
The corpse is at rest within the^ tomb, 
We begin in what we end. 



POEMS ON DEATH. 39 



THE DIRGE OF GINEVRA. 

Old winter was gone 
In his weakness back to the mountains hoar, 

And the spring came down 
From the planet that hovers upon the shore 

Where the sea of sunhght encroaches 
On the hmits of wintry night ; — 
If the land, and the air, and the sea 

Rejoice not when spring approaches, 
We did not rejoice in thee, 

Ginevra! 



She is still, she is cold 

On the bridal couch, 
One step to the white death-bed. 

And one to the bier. 
And one to the charnel — and one, O where? 

The dark arrow fled 

In the noon. 



Ere the sun through heaven once more has rolled, 
The rats in her heart 
Will have made their nest, 
And the worms be alive in her golden hair, 
While the spirit that guides the sun. 
Sits throned in his flaming chair. 
She shall sleep. 

1821. 



40 POEMS ON DEATH. 



THE DIRGE OF BEATRICE. 

False friend, wilt thou smile or weep 
When my life is laid asleep? 
Little cares for a smile or a tear, 
The clay-cold corpse upon the bier ! 

Farewell ! Heigho ! 

What is this whispers low? 
There is a snake in thy smile, my dear ; 
And bitter poison within thy tear. 

Sweet sleep, were death like to thee, 
Or if thou couldst mortal be, 
I would close these eyes of pain ; 
When to wake? Never again. 

O, World ! Farewell ! 

Listen to the passing bell ! 
It says, thou and I must part. 
With a light and a heavy heart. 



Cenci. 



SLEEP AND DEATH. 

They. We strew these opiate flowers 
On thy restless pillow, — 
They were stript from Orient bowers, 
By the Indian billow 
Be thy sleep 
Calm and deep, 
Like theirs who fell — not ours who weep ! 



POEMS ON DEATH. 4 1 

She. Away, unlovely dreams ! 

Away, false shapes of sleep ! 
Be his, as Heaven seems, 
Clear, and bright, and deep ! 
Soft as love, and calm as death. 
Sweet as a summer night without a breath. 

They. Sleep, sleep ! our song is laden 
With the soul of slumber ; 
It was sung by a Samian maiden. 
Whose lover was of the number 
Who now keep 
That calm sleep 
Whence none may wake, where none shall weep. 

She. I touch thy temples pale ! 

I breathe my soul on thee ! 
And could my prayers avail, 
All my joy should be 
Dead, and I would live to weep, 
So thou might'st win one hour of quiet sleep. 

Hellas. 



'* Songs Consecrate to Hiberts/' 



TO WORDSWORTH. 

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know 
That things depart which never may return : 
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, 
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. 
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine 
Which thou too feePst, yet I alone deplore. 
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine 
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar : 
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood 
Above the blind and battling multitude : 
In honored poverty thy voice did weave 
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, — 
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve. 
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be. 

1815. 



THE SNAKE AND EAGLE. 

When the last hope of trampled France had failed 
Like a brief dream of unremaining glory, 
From visions of despair I rose, and scaled 
The peak of an aerial promontory, 
42 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 43 

Whose caverned base with the vext surge was 

hoary ; 
And saw the golden dawn break forth, and waken 
Each cloud, and every wave : — but transitory 
The calm : for sudden, the firm earth was shaken, 
As if by the last wreck its frame were overtaken. 

So as I stood, one blast of muttering thunder 
Burst in far peals along the waveless deep, 
When, gathering fast, around, above and under, 
Long trains of tremulous mist began to creep, 
Until their complicating lines did steep 
The orient sun in shadow : — not a sound 
Was heard ; one horrible repose did keep 
The forests and the floods, and all around 
Darkness more dread than night was poured upon 
the ground. 

Hark ! His the rushing of a wind that sweeps 
Earth and the ocean. See ! the lightnings yawn 
Deluging Heaven with fire, and the lashed deeps 
Glitter and boil beneath : it rages on, 
One mighty stream, whirlwind and waves upthrown. 
Lightning, and hail, and darkness eddying by. 
There is a pause — the sea-birds, that were gone 
Into their caves to shriek, come forth, to spy 
What calm has falPn on earth, what light is in the 
sky. 

For, where the irresistible storm had cloven 
That fearful darkness, the blue sky was seen 
Fretted with many a fair cloud interwoven 
Most delicately, and the ocean green. 



44 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

Beneath that opening spot of blue serene, 
Quivered like burning emerald : calm was spread 
On all below ; but far on high, between 
Earth and the upper air, the vast clouds fled, 
Countless and swift as leaves on autumn's tempest 
shed. 

For ever, as the war became more fierce 
Between the whirlwinds and the rack on high. 
That spot grew more serene ; blue light did pierce 
The woof of those white clouds, which seemed to 

lie 
Far, deep, and motionless ; while thro' the sky 
The pallid semicircle of the moon 
Past on, in slow and moving majesty ; 
Its upper horn arrayed in mists, which soon 

But slowly fled, like deAv beneath the beams of noon. 

« 

I could not choose but gaze ; a fascination 

Dwelt in that moon, and sky, and clouds, which 

drew 
My fancy thither, and in expectation 
Of what I knew not, I remained : — the hue 
Of the white moon, amid that heaven so blue, 
Suddenly stained with shadow did appear ; 
A speck, a cloud, a shape, approaching grew, 
Like a great ship in the sunn's sinking sphere 
Beheld afar at sea, and swift it came anear. 

Even like a bark, which from a chasm of mountains. 
Dark, vast, and overhanging, on a river 
Which there collects the strength of all its fountains, 
Comes forth, whilst with the speed its frame doth 
quiver, 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 45 

Sails, oars, and stream, tending to one endeavor ; 
So, from that chasm of light a winged Form 
On all the winds of heaven approaching ever 
Floated, dilating as it came : the storm 
Pursued it with fierce blasts, and lightnings swift and 
warm. 

A course precipitous, of dizzy speed. 

Suspending thought and breath ; a monstrous 

sight ! 
For in the air do I behold indeed 
An Eagle and a Serpent wreathed in fight : — 
And now relaxing its impetuous flight, 
Before the aerial rock on which I stood, 
The Eagle, hovering, wheeled to left and right, 
And hung with lingering wings over the flood. 
And startled with its yells the wide air's solitude. 

A shaft of light upon its wings descended. 
And every golden featker gleamed therein — 
Feather and scale inextricably blended. 
The Serpent's mailed and many-colored skin 
Shone thro' the plumes its coils were twined within 
By many a swollen and knotted fold, and high 
And far, the neck receding lithe and thin. 
Sustained a crested head, which warily 
Shifted and glanced before the Eagle's stedfast eye. 

Around, around, in ceaseless circles wheeling 
With clang of wings and scream, the Eagle sailed 
Incessantly — sometimes on high concealing 
Its lessening orbs, sometimes as if it failed, 



46 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

Drooped thro' the air ; and still it shrieked and 

wailed, 
And casting back its eager head, with beak 
And talon unremittingly assailed 
The wreathed Serpent, who did ever seek 
Upon his enemy's heart a mortal wound to wreak. 

What life, what power was kindled and arose 
Within the sphere of that appalling fray ! 
For, from the encounter of those wondrous foes, 
A vapor like the sea's suspended spray 
Hung gathered : in the void air, far away. 
Floated the shattered plumes ; bright scales did 

leap, 
Where'er the Eagle's talons made their way. 
Like sparks into the darkness ; — as they sweep. 
Blood stains the snowy foam of the tumultuous deep. 

Swift chances in that combat — many a check. 
And many a change, a dark and wild turmoil ; 
Sometimes the Snake around his enemy's neck 
Locked in stiff rings his adamantine coil, 
Until the Eagle, faint with pain and toil, 
Remitted his strong flight, and near the sea 
Languidly fluttered, hopeless so to foil 
His adversary, who then reared on high 
His red and burning crest, radiant with victory. 

Then on the white edge of the bursting surge. 
Where they had sunk together, would the Snake 
Relax his suffocating grasp, and scourge 
The wind with his wild writhings ; for to break 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 47 

That chain of torment, the vast bird would shake 
The strength of his unconquerable wings 
As in despair, and with his sinewy neck, 
Dissolve in sudden shock those linked rings, ' 
Then soar — as swift as smoke from a volcano springs. 

Wile baffled wile, and strength encountered strength, 
Thus long, but unprevailing : — the event 
Of that portentous fight appeared at length : 
Until the lamp of day was almost spent 
It had endured, when lifeless, stark, and rent, 
Hung high that mighty Serpent, and at last 
Fell to the sea, while o'er the continent, 
With clang of wings and scream the Eagle past, 
Heavily borne away on the exhausted blast. 



Such is this conflict — when mankind doth strive 
With its oppressors in a strife of blood. 
Or when free thoughts, like lightnings are alive ; 
And in each bosom of the multitude 
Justice and truth, with custom's hydra brood 
Wage silent war ; — when priests and kings dis- 
semble 
In smiles or frowns their fierce disquietude. 
When round pure hearts, a host of hopes assemble, 
The Snake and Eagle meet — the world's foundations 
tremble ! 

Revolt of Islam, canto i. 1817. 



48 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 



THE MASK OF ANARCHY. 

WRITTEN ON THE OCCASION OF THE MASSACRE AT 
MANCHESTER. 

As I lay asleep in Italy 
There came a voice from over the Sea, 
And with great power it forth led me 
To walk in the visions of Poesy. 

I met Murder on the way — 
He had a mask like Castlereagh ; 
Very smooth he looked, yet grim ; 
Seven blood-hounds followed him : 

All were fat ; and well they might 

Be in admirable plight, 

For one by one, and two by two, 

He tossed them human hearts to chew 

Which from his wide cloak he drew. 

Next came Fraud, and he had on. 
Like Eldon, an ermined gown ; 
His big tears, for he wept well, 
Turned to mill-stones as they fell. 

And the little children, who 

Round his feet played to and fro, 

Thinking every tear a gem. 

Had their brains knocked out by them. 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 49 

Clothed with the Bible, as with light, 
And the shadows of the night, 
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy 
On a crocodile rode by. 

And many more Destructions played 
In this ghastly masquerade, 
All disguised, even to the eyes. 
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers or spies. 

Last came Anarchy : he rode 

On a white horse, splashed with blood ; 

He was pale even to the lips, 

Like Death in the Apocalypse. 

And he wore a kingly crown ; 

And in his grasp a sceptre shone ; 

On his brow this mark I saw — 

" I AM God, and King, and Law ! " 

With a pace stately and fast, 
Over English land he past, 
Trampling to a mire of blood 
The adoring multitude. 

And a mighty troop around. 

With their trampling shook the ground, 

Waving each a bloody sword, 

For the service of their Lord. 

And with glorious triumph, they 
Rode thro' England proud and gay, 
Drunk as with intoxication 
Of the wine of desolation. 



ijO SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

O'er fields and towns, from sea to sea, 
Past the Pageant swift and free, 
Tearing up, and trampling down ; 
Till they came to London town. 

And each dweller, panic-stricken, 
Felt his heart with terror sicken 
Hearing the tempestuous cry 
Of the triumph of Anarchy. 

For with pomp to meet him came, 
Clothed in arms like blood and flame, 
The hired murderers, who did sing 
"Thou art God, and Law, and King. 

"We have waited, weak and lone 

For thy coming. Mighty One ! 

Our purses are empty, our swords are cold, 

Give us glory, and blood, and gold." 

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd, 
To the earth their pale brows bowed ; 
Like a bad prayer not over loud, 
Whispering — " Thou art Law and God." — 

Then all cried with one accord, 
"Thou art King, and God, and Lord; 
Anarchy, to thee we bow, 
Be thy name made holy now ! " 

And Anarchy, the Skeleton, 
Bowed and grinned to every one, 
As well as if his education 
Had cost ten millions to the nation. 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 51 

For he knew the Palaces 
Of our Kings were nightly his ; 
His the sceptre, crown, and globe, 
And the gold-inwoven robe. 

So he sent his slaves before 
To seize upon the Bank and Tower, 
And was proceeding with intent 
To meet his pensioned Parliament 

When one fled past, a maniac maid, 
And her name was Hope, she said : 
But she looked more like Despair, 
And she cried out in the air : 

"My father Time is weak and gray 
With waiting for a better day ; 
See how idiot-like he stands, 
Fumbling with his palsied hands ! 

" He has had child after child, 
And the dust of death is piled 
Over every one but me — 
Misery, oh, Misery ! " 

Then she lay down in the street, 
Right before the horses' feet, 
Expecting, with a patient eye, 
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy. 

When between her and her foes 
A mist, a light, an image rose, 
Small at first, and weak, and frail 
Like the vapor of a vale : 



52 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

Till as clouds grow on the blast, 
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast, 
And glare with lightnings as they fly, 
And speak in thunder to the sky, 

It grew — a Shape arrayed in mail 
Brighter than the viper's scale. 
And upborne on wings whose grain 
Was as the light of sunny rain. 

On its helm, seen far away, 
A planet, like the Morning's, lay ; 
And those plumes its light rained thro' 
Like a shower of crimson dew. 

With step as soft as wind it past 
O'er the heads of men — so fast 
That. they knew the presence there, 
And looked, — and all was empty air. 

As flowers beneath May's footstep waken, 
As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken, 
As waves arise when loud winds call. 
Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall. 

And the prostrate multitude 
Looked — and ankle-deep in blood, 
Hope, that maiden most serene. 
Was walking with a quiet mien : 

And Anarchy, the ghastly birth. 

Lay dead earth upon the earth ; 

The Horse of Death tameless as wind 

Fled, and with his hoofs did grind 

To dust, the murderers thronged behind. 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 53 

A rushing light of clouds and splendor, 
A sense awakening and yet tender 
Was heard and felt — and at its close 
These words of joy and fear arose 

As if their own indignant Earth 
Which gave the sons of England birth 
Had felt their blood upon her brow, 
And shuddering with a mother's throe 

Had turned every drop of blood 
By which her face had been bedewed 
To an accent unwithstood, — 
As if her heart had cried aloud : 

" Men of England, heirs of Glory, 
Heroes of unwritten story, 
Nurslings of one mighty Mother, 
Hopes of her, and one another ; 

" Rise like Lions after slumber 
In unvanquishable number — 
Shake your chains to earth like dew 
Which in sleep had fallen on you — 
Ye are many — they are few." 

1819. 



54 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 
SONG 

TO THE MEN OF ENGLAND. 

Men of England, wherefore plough 
For the lords who lay ye low ? 
Wherefore weave with toil and care 
The rich robes your tyrants wear? 

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save, 
From the cradle to the grave. 
Those ungrateful drones who would 
Drain your sweat — na}', drink your blood ? 

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge 
Many a weapon, chain and scourge, 
That these stingless drones may spoil 
The forced produce of your toil? 

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm. 
Shelter, food, love's gentle balm? 
Or what is it ye buy so dear 
With your pain and with your fear? 

The seed ye sow, another reaps ; 
The wealth ye find, another keeps ; 
The robes ye weave, another wears ; 
The arms ye forge, another bears. 

Sow seed, — but let no tyrant reap ; 
Find wealth, — let no impostor heap ; 
Weave robes, — let not the idle wear ; 
Forge arms, — in your defence to bear. 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 55 

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells ; 
In halls ye deck another dwells. 
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see 
The steel ye tempered glance on ye. 

With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, 
Trace your grave, and build your tomb, 
And weave your winding sheet, till fair 
England be your sepulchre. 

1819. 



SONNET : 

ENGLAND IN 1819. 

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, — 
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow 
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring, 
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, 
But leech-like to their fainting country cling, 
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, — 
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field. 
An army, which liberticide and prey 
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield 
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay ; 
Religion Christless, Godless — a book sealed ; 
A Senate, — Time's worst statute unrepealed, — 
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may 
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. 



56 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 



SONNET : 

POLITICAL GREATNESS. 

Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame, 

Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts, 

Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame ; 

Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts, 

History is but the shadow of their shame, 

Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts 

As to oblivion their blind millions fleet. 

Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery 

Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit 

By force or custom ? Man who man would be, 

Must rule the empire of himself; in it 

Must be supreme, establishing his throne 

On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy 

Of hopes and fears, being himself alone. 

1821. 



ODE TO LIBERTY. 

Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner torn but flying, 
Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind. 

Byron. 

A GLORIOUS people vibrated again : 

The lightning of the nations. Liberty, 
From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o'er Spain, 

Scattering contagious fire into the sky. 
Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay, 
And, in the rapid plumes of song, 
Clothed itself, sublime and strong ; 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 57 

As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among, 
Hovering in verse o'er its accustomed prey ; 
Till from its station in the heaven of fame 
The spirit's whirlwind rapt it, and the ray 
Of the remotest sphere of living flame 
Which paves the void was from behind it flung, 
As foam from a ship's swiftness, when there came 
A voice out of the deep : I will record the same. 

The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth : 

The burning stars of the abyss were hurled 

Into the depths of heaven. The daedal earth. 

That island in the ocean of the world, 
Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air : 
But this divinest universe 
Was yet a chaos and a curse, 
For thou wert not : but power from worst producing 
worse, 
The spirit of the beasts was kindled there, 

And of the birds, and of the watery forms, 
And there was war among them, and despair 
Within them, raging without truce or terms : 
The bosom of their violated nurse 

Groaned, for beasts warred on beasts, and worms 

on worms. 
And men on men ; each heart was as a hell of 
storms. 

Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied 

His generations under the pavilion 
Of the Sun's throne : palace and pyramid, 

Temple and prison, to many a swarming million, 



58 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

Were, as to mountain- wolves their ragged caves. 
This human living multitude 
Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude, 
For thou wert not ; but o'er the populous solitude, 
Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves 

Hung Tyranny ; beneath, sate deified 
The sister-pest, congregator of slaves ; 
Into the shadow of her pinions wide 
Anarchs and priests who feed on gold and blood, 
Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed, 
Drove the astonished herds of men from every side. 

The nodding promontories, and blue isles. 

And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves 
Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles 

Of favoring heaven : from their enchanted caves 
Prophetic echoes flung dim melody. 
On the unapprehensive wild 
The vine, the corn, the olive mild. 
Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled ; 
And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea. 

Like the man's thought dark in the infant's brain. 
Like aught that is which wraps what is to be. 
Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein 
Of Parian stone ; and yet a speechless child. 
Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain 
Her lidless eyes for thee ; when o'er the -^Egean 



Athens arose : a city such as vision 

Builds from the purple crags and silver towers 
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision 

Of kingliest masonry : the ocean-floors 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 59 

Pave it ; the evening sky pavilions it ; 
Its portals are inhabited 
By thunder-zoned winds, each head 
Within its cloudy wings with sunfire garlandrd, 
A divine work ! Athens diviner yet 

Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will 
Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set ; 
For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill 
Peopled with forms that mock the eternal dead 
In marble immortality, that hill 
Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle. 

Within the surface of Time's fleeting river 

Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay 
Immovably unquiet, and for ever 

It trembles, but it cannot pass away ! 
The voices of thy bards and sages thunder 
With an earth-awakening blast 
Through the caverns of the past ; 
Religion veils her eyes ; Oppression shrinks aghast : 
A winged sound of joy, and love, and wonder. 
Which soars where Expectation never flew. 
Rending the veil of space and time asunder ! 
One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew ; 
One sun illumines heaven ; one spirit vast 
With life and love makes chaos ever new, 
As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew. 

Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest. 
Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmaean Maenad, 

She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest 
From that Elysian food was yet u.n weaned ,- 



6o SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

And many a deed of terrible uprightness 
By thy sweet love was sanctified ; 
And in thy smile, and by thy side, 
Saintly Camillus lived, and firm Atilius died. 

But when tears stained thy robe of vestal whiteness, 

And gold profaned thy Capitolian throne, 
Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness, 
The senate of the tyrants : they sunk prone 
Slaves of one tyrant : Palatinus sighed 
Faint echoes of Ionian song ; that tone 
Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown. 

From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill. 
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main, 
Or utmost islet inaccessible. 

Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign. 
Teaching the woods and waves, and desert rocks. 
And every Naiad's ice-cold urn, 
To talk in echoes sad and stern. 
Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn ? 
For neither didst thou watch the wizard flocks 

Of the Scald's dreams, nor haunt the Druid's sleep. 
What if the tears rained through thy shattered locks 
Were quickly dried .'' for thou didst groan, not 
weep, 
When from its sea of death, to kill and burn, 
The Galilean serpent forth did creep. 
And made thy world an undistinguishable heap. 

A thousand years the Earth cried. Where art thou i* 
And then the shadow of thy coming fell 

On Saxon Alfred's olive-cinctured brow : 
And many a warrior-peopled citadel, 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 6i 

Like rocks which fire h'fts out of the flat deep, 
Arose in sacred Italy, 
Frowning o'er the tempestuous sea 
Of kings, and priests, and slaves, in tower-crowned 
majesty ; 
That multitudinous anarchy did sweep, 

And burst around their walls, like idle foam, 
Whilst from the human spirit's deepest deep 
Strange melody with love and awe struck dumb 
Dissonant arms ; and Art, which cannot die, 
With divine wand traced on our earthly home 
Fit imagery to pave heaven's everlasting dome. 

Thou huntress swifter than the Moon ! thou terror 

Of the world's wolves ! thou bearer of the quiver, 

Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-winged Error, 

As light may pierce the clouds when they dissever 
In the calm regions of the orient day ! 

Luther caught thy wakening glance, 
Like lightning, from his leaden lance 
Reflected, it dissolved the visions of the trance 
In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay ; 

And England's prophets hailed thee as their 
queen, 
In songs whose music cannot pass away, 
Though it must flow for ever : not unseen 
Before the spirit-sighted countenance 

Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene 
Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien. 

The eager hours and unreluctant years 

As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood, 
Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears. 



62 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

Darkening each other with their multitude, 
And cried aloud, Liberty ! Indignation 
Answered Pity from her cave ; 
Death grew pale within the grave, 
And Desolation howled to the destroyer, Save ! 
When like heaven's sun girt by the exhalation 

Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise, 
Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation 

Like shadows : as if day had cloven the skies 
At dreaming midnight o'er the western wave, 
Men started, staggering with a glad surprise. 
Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes. 

Thou heaven of earth ! what spells could pall thee 
then, 
In ominous eclipse ? a thousand years 
Bred from the slime of deep oppression's den, 

Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears, 
Till thy sweet stars could wipe the stain away ; 
How like Bacchanals of blood 
Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood 
Destruction's sceptred slaves, and Folly's mitred 
brood ! 
When one, like them, but mightier far than they. 

The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers 
Rose : armies mingled in obscure array. 

Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred 
bowers 
Of serene heaven. He, by the past pursued, 
Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours. 
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral 
towers. 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 6;^ 

•England yet sleeps: was she not called of old? 

Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder 
Vesuvius wakens ^tna, and the cold 

Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder : 
O'er the lit waves every ^olian isle 
From Pithecusa to Pelorus 
Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus : 
They cry, '' Be dim, ye lamps of heaven suspended 
o'er us." 
Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile 
And they dissolve ; but Spain's were links of steel, 
Till bit to dust by virtue's keenest file. 
Twins of a single destiny ! appeal 
To the eternal years enthroned before us. 
In the dim West ; impress us from a seal, 
All ye have thought and done ! Time cannot dare 
conceal. 

Tomb of Arminius ! render up thy dead, 

Till, like a standard from a watch-tower's staff, 
His soul may stream over the tyrant's head ; 

Thy victory shall be his epitaph, 
Wild Bacchanal of truth's mysterious wine, 
King-deluded Germany, 
His dead spirit lives in thee. 
Why do we fear or hope ? thou art already free ! 
And thou, lost Paradise of this divine 

And glorious world ! thou flowery wilderness' ! 
Thou island of eternity ! thou shrine 

Where desolation clothed with loveliness, 
Worships the thing thou wert ! O Italy, 



64 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

Gather thy blood into thy heart ; repress 

The beasts who make their dens thy sacred pal- 



O, that the free would stamp the impious name 

Of King into the dust ! or write it there, 
So that this blot upon the page of fame 

Were as a serpent's path, which the light air 
Erases, and the flat sands close behind ! 
Ye the oracle have heard : 
Lift the victory-flashing sword, 
And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word, 
Which weak itself as stubble, yet can bind 

Into a mass, irrefragably firm, 
The axes and the rods which awe mankind ; 
The sound has poison in it, 'tis the sperm 
Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred ; 
Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term. 
To set thine armed heel on this reluctant worm. 

O, that the wise from their bright minds would 
kindle 
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world, 
That the pale name of Priest might shrink and 
dwindle 
Into the hell from which it first was hurled, 
A scoff^ of impious pride from fiends impure ; 
Till human thoughts might kneel alone 
Each before the judgment-throne 
Of its own aweless soul, or of the power unknown ! 
O, that the words which make the thoughts ob- 
scure 



SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 65 

From which they spring, as clouds of glimmer- 
ing dew 
From a white lake blot heaven's blue portraiture, 
Were stript of their thin masks and various hue 
And frowns and smiles and splendors not their own, 
Till in the nakedness of false and true 
They stand before their Lord, each to receive its 
due. 

He who taught men to vanquish whatsoever 
Can be between the cradle and the grave 
Crowned him the King of Life. O vain endeavor ! 

If on his own high will a willing slave, 
He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor. 
What if earth can clothe and feed 
Amplest millions at their need, 
And power in thought be as the tree within the seed? 
O, what if Art, an ardent intercessor, 

Driving on fi'ery wings to Nature's throne, 
Checks the great mother stooping to caress her. 
And cries : '• Give me, thy child, dominion 
Over all height and depth ? " if Life can breed 

New wants, and wealth from those who toil and 

groan 
Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousand fold for one. 

Come Thou, but lead out of the inmost cave 
Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star 

Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave. 
Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car 

Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame ; 



66 SONGS CONSECRATE TO LIBERTY. 

Comes she not, and come ye not, 
Rulers of eternal thought, 
To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned 
lot ? 
Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame 

Of what has been, the Hope of what will be ? 
O, Liberty ! if such could be thy name 

Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from 
thee : 
If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought 
By blood or tears, have not the wise and free 
Wept tears, and blood like tears ? The solemn 
harmony 

Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing 

To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn ; 
Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging 
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn, 
Sinks headlong through the aerial golden light 
On the heavy sounding plain. 
When the bolt has pierced its brain ; 
As summer clouds dissolve, unburdened of their 
rain ; 
As a far taper fades with fading night, 

As a brief insect dies with dying day. 
My song, its pinions disarrayed of might. 
Drooped ; o'er it closed the echoes far away 
Of the great voice which did its flight sustain. 
As waves which lately paved his watery way 
Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous 
play. 

1820. 



poems on Eimt antr its Cljangesi* 



OZYMANDIAS. 

I MET a traveller from an antique land 
Who said : " Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command. 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things. 
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed : 
And on the pedestal these words appear : 
' My name is Ozymandias, king of kings : 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair ! ' 
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
The lone and level sands stretch far away." 

1817. 



TIME. 

Unfathomable Sea ! whose waves are years, 
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe 

Are brackish with the salt of human tears ! 

Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow 

67 



68 POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 

Claspest the limits of mortality ! 
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, 
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore ; 
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, 
Who shall put forth on thee, 
Unfathomable Sea ? 

1821. 



THE SEASONS. 

The blasts of Autumn drive the winged seeds 
Over the earth, — next come the snows, and 
rain, 
And frosts, and storms, which dreary Winter leads 
Out of his Scythian cave, a savage train ; 
Behold ! Spring sweeps over the world again, 
Shedding soft dews from her etherial wings ; 

Flowers on the mountains, fruits over the plain. 
And music on the waves and woods she flings, 
And love on all that lives, and calm on lifeless 
things. 

O Spring ! of hope and love and youth and glad- 
ness 

Wind-winged emblem ! brightest, best, and fair- 
est ! 
Whence comest thou, when, with dark Winter's 
sadness 

The tears that fade in sunny smiles thou sharest ; 

Sister of joy, thou art the child who wearest 



POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 69 

Thy mother's dying smile, tender and sweet ; 
Thy mother Autumn, for whose grave thou bear- 
est 
Fresh flowers, and beams Hke flowers, with gentle 
feet, 
Disturbing not the leaves which are her winding- 
sheet. 

Revolt of Islam, Canto ix. 



SPRING. 

'TwAS at the season when the Earth upsprings 
From slumber, as a sphered angel's child, 
Shadowing its eyes with green and golden wings. 

Stands up before its mother bright and mild, 
Of whose soft voice ihe air expectant seems — 
So stood before the sun, which shone and smiled 

To see it rise thus joyous from its dreams, 
The fresh and radiant Earth. The hoary grove 
Waxed green — and flowers burst forth like starry 
beams : — 

The grass in the warm sun did start and move, 
And sea-buds burst beneath the waves serene : — 
How many a one, though none be near to love, 

Loves then the shade of his own soul, half seen 
In any mirror — or the spring's young minions, 
The winged leaves amid the copses green ; — 



70 POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 

How many a spirit then puts on the pinions 

Of fancy, and outstrips the lagging blast, 

And his own steps — and over wide dominions 

Sweeps in his dream-drawn chariot, far and fast, 
More fleet than storms — the wide world shrinks 

below, 
When winter and despondency are past. 

Prince Athanase. 1817. 



JUNE. 

It was the azure time of June, 

When the skies are deep in the stainless noon, 
And the warm and fitful breezes shake 
The fresh green leaves of the hedgerow briar, 
And there were odors then to make 
The very breath we did respire 

A liquid element, whereon 

Our spirits, like delighted things 

That walk the air on subtle wings, 

Floated and mingled far away. 

Mid the warm winds of the sunny day. 

And when the evening star came forth 
Above the curve of the new-bent moon, 

And light and sound ebbed from the earth, 

Like the tide of the full and weary sea 

To the depths of its own tranquillity, 

Our natures to its own repose 

Did the Earth's breathless sleep attune. 

Rosalind and Helen. 



POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 71 



SUMMER AND WINTER. 

It was a bright and cheerful afternoon, 
Towards the end of the sunny month of June, 
When the north wind congregates in crowds 
The floating mountains of the silver clouds 
From the horizon — and the stainless sky 
Opens beyond them like eternity. 
All things rejoiced beneath the sun ; the weeds, 
The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds ; 
The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze 
And the firm foliage of the larger trees. 

It was a winter such as when birds die 
In the deep forests ; and the fishes lie 
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes 
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes 
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick ; and when, 
Among their children, comfortable men 
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold : 
Alas then for the homeless beggar old ! 

1820. 



AUTUMN. 



The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, 
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are 
dying. 



72 POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 

And the year 

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves 

dead, 

Is lying. 

Come, months, come away, 

From November to May, 

In your saddest array ; 

Follow the bier 

Of the dead cold year, 

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. 

The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling, 

The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling 

For the year ; 

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each 

gone 

To his dwelling ; 

Come, months, come away ; 
Put on white, black, and gray ; 
Let your light sisters play — 
Ye, follow the bier 
Of the dead cold year. 
And make her grave green with tear on tear. 

1820. 



DIRGE FOR THE YEAR. 

Orphan hours, the year is dead. 
Come and sigh, come and weep! 

Merry hours, smile instead, 
For the year is but asleep. 

See, it smiles as it is sleeping. 

Mocking your untimely weeping. 



POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 73 

As an earthquake rocks a corse 

In its coffin in the clay, 
So White Winter, that rough nurse, 

Rocks the death-cold year to-day ; 
Solemn hours ! wail aloud 
For your mother in her shroud. 

As the wild air stirs and sways 
The tree-swung cradle of a child, 

So the breath of these rude days 

Rocks the year : — be calm and mild, 

Trembling hours, she will arise 

With new love within her eyes. 

January gray is here. 

Like a sexton by her grave ; 
February bears the bier, 

March with grief doth howl and rave. 

And April weeps — but, O, ye hours. 

Follow with May's fairest flowers. 

1821. 



MUTABILITY. 

The flower that smiles to-day 
To-morrow dies ; 

All that we wish to stay 

Tempts and then flies. 

What is this world's delight ? 

Lightning that mocks the night, 
Brief even as bright. 



74 POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 

Virtue, how frail it is ! 

Friendship how rare ! . 
Love, how it sells poor bliss 

For proud despair ! 
But we, though soon they fall, 
Survive their joy, and all 
Which ours we call. 

Whilst skies are blue and bright, 
Whilst flowers are gay, 
Whilst eyes that change ere night 

Make glad the day ; 
Whilst yet the calm hours creep, 
Dream thou — and from thy sleep 
Then wake to weep. 

1821. 



TO-MORROW. 

Where art thou, beloved To-morrow? 

When young and old and strong and weak, 
Rich and poor, through joy and sorrow. 

Thy sweet smiles we ever seek, — 
In thy place — ah ! well-a-day ! 
We find the thing we fled — To-day. 

1821. 



POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 



LINES. 

If I walk in Autumn's even 

While the dead leaves pass, 
If I look on Spring's soft heaven, — 

Something is not there which was. 
Winter's wondrous frost and snow, 
Summer's clouds, where are they now? 

J821. 

THE PAST. 

Wilt thou forget the happy hours 
Which we buried in Love's sweet bowers, 
Heaping over their corpses cold 
Blossoms and leaves, instead of mould? 
Blossoms which were the joys ^hat fell, 
And leaves, the hopes that yet remain. 

Forget the dead, the past? O yet 
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it, 
Memories that make the heart a tomb, 
Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom, 
And with ghastly whispers tell 
That joy, once lost, is pain. 



75 



1818. 



TIME LONG PAST. 

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead 

Is time long past. 
A tone which is now forever fled. 



76 POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 

A hope which is now forever past, 
A love so sweet it could not last, 
Was time long past. 

There were sweet dreams in the night 

Of time long past : 
And, was it sadness or delight, 
Each day a shadow onward cast 
Which made us wish it yet might last — 
That time long past. 

There is regret, almost remorse, 

For time long past. 
'Tis like a child's beloved corap 
A father watches, till at last 
Beauty is like remembrance cast 

P From time long past. 

1820. 



LINES. 

That time is dead forever, child. 
Drowned, frozen, dead forever ! 

We look on the past 

And stare aghast 
At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast, 
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled 

To death on life's dark river. 



POEMS ON TIME AND ITS CHANGES. 77 

The stream we gazed on then, rolled by ; 
Its waves are unreturning ; 

But we yet stand 

In a lone land, 
Like tombs to mark the memory 
Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee 
In the light of life's dim morning. 

1817. 



Songs of ILobe. 



LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY. 

The fountains mingle with the river, 

And the rivers with the ocean ; 
The winds of heaven mix for ever 

With a sweet emotion ; 
Nothing in the world is single ; 

All things by a law divine 
In one another's being mingle ; — 

Why not I with thine? 

See the mountains kiss high heaven, 

And the waves clasp one another ; 
No sister flower would be forgiven, 

If it disdained its brother ; 
And the sunlight clasps the earth, 

And the moonbeams kiss the sea: 
What are all these kissings worth. 

If thou kiss not me? 



1819. 



FROM THE ARABIC. 

AN IMITATION. 

My faint spirit was sitting in the light 
Of thy looks, my love ; 
It panted for thee like the hind at noon 
78 



SONGS OF LOVE. 79 

For the brooks, my love. 
Thy barb whose hoofs outspeed the tempest's flight 
Bore thee far from me ; 
My heart, for my weak feet were weary soon, 
Did companion thee. 

Ah ! fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed, 
Or the death they bear, 
The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove 
With the wings of care ; 
In the battle, in the darkness, in the need. 
Shall mine cling to thee, 
Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love, 
It may bring to thee. 

1821. 



THE INDIAN SERENADE. 

I ARISE from dreams of thee 
In the first sweet sleep of night, 
When the winds are breathing low, 
And the stars are shining bright : 
I arise from dreams of thee. 
And a spirit in my feet 
Hath led me — who knows- how? 
To thy chamber window. Sweet! 

The wandering airs they faint 
On the dark, the silent stream — 
And the champak-odors fail 
Like sweet thoughts in a dream ; 



So SONGS OF LOVE. 

The nightingale's complaint, 
It dies upon her heart ; — 
As I must on thine, 
O ! beloved as thou art ! 

lift me from the grass ! 

1 die ! I faint ! I fail ! 
Let thy love in kisses rain 
On my lips and eyelids pale. 

My cheek is cold and white, alas ! 
My heart beats loud and fast ; — 
Oh ! press it close to thine again, 
Where it will break at last. 



TO . 

I FEAR thy kisses, gentle maiden, 
Thou needest not fear mine ; 

My spirit is too deeply laden 
Ever to burden thine. 

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion, 
Thou needest not fear mine ; 

Innocent is the heart's devotion 
With which I worship thine. 



819. 



[820 



SONG FOR "TASSO." 

I LOVED — alas ! our life is love ; 

But when we cease to breathe and move 

I do suppose love ceases too. 



SONGS OF LOVE. 8 1 

I thought, but not as now I do, 
Keen thoughts and bright of linked lore. 
Of all that men had thought before, 
And all that nature shows, and more. 

And still I love and still I think, 
But strangely, for my heart can drink 
The dregs of such despair, and live, 
And love ; 

And if I think, my thoughts come fast, 
I mix the present with the past. 
And each seems uglier than the last. 

Sometimes I see before me flee 

A silver spirit^s form, like thee, 

O Leonora, and I sit 

Still watching it, 

Till by the grated casement's ledge 

It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge 

Breathes o'er the breezy streamlet's edge. 



LOVE LEFT ALONE. 

I LOVED, I love, and when I love no more, 
Let joys and grief perish, and leave despair 
To ring the knell of youth. He stood beside me, 
The embodied vision of the brightest dream. 
Which like a dawn heralds the day of life ; 
The shadow of his presence made my world 
A paradise. All familiar things he touched, 



82 SONGS OF LOVE. 

All common words he spoke, became to me 
Like forms and sounds of a diviner world. 
He was as is the sun in his fierce youth, 
As terrible and lovely as a tempest ; 
He came, and went, and left me what I am. 

Alas ! Why must I think how oft we two 

Have sate together near the river springs, 

Under the green pavilion which the willow 

Spreads on the floor of the unbroken fountain, 

Strewn by the nurslings that linger there. 

Over that islet paved with flowers and moss, 

While the musk-rose leaves, like flakes of crimson 

snow, 
Showered on us, and the dove mourned in the pine. 
Sad prophetess of sorrows not her own ? 
The crane returned to her unfrozen haunt, 
And the false cuckoo bade the spray good morn ; 
And on a wintry bough the widowed bird-. 
Hid in the deepest night of ivy-leaves. 
Renewed the vigils of a sleepless sorrow. 

An Unfinished Drama . 1822. 



A SONG. 

A WIDOW bird sate mourning for her love 

Upon a wintry bough ; 
The frozen wind crept on above,- 

The freezing stream below. 



SONGS OF LOVE. 83 

There was no leaf upon the forest bare, 

No flower upon the ground, 
And little motion in the air 

Except the mill-wheers sound. 

1822. 



LOVE AND PARTING. 

She saw me not — she heard me not — alone 

Upon the mountain's dizzy brink she stood ; 

She spake not, breathed not, moved not — there 

was thrown 
Over her look, the shadow of a mood 
Which only clothes the heart in solitude, 
A thought of voiceless depth ; — she stood alone, 
Above, the Heavens were spread; — below, the 

flood 
Was murmuring in its caves ; — the wind had 

blown 
Her hair apart, thro' which her eyes and forehead 

shone. 

A cloud was hanging o'er the western mountains ; 
Before its blue and moveless depth were flying 
Gray mists poured forth from the unresting foun- 
tains 
Of darkness in the North : — the day was dying : — 
Sudden, the sun shone forth, its beams were lying 
Like boiling gold on Ocean, strange to see. 
And on the shattered vapors, which defying 
The power of light in vain, tossed restlessly 
In the red Heaven, like wrecks in a tempestuous sea. 



84 SONGS OF LOVE, 

It was a stream of living beams, whose bank 
On either side by the cloud's cleft was made ; 
And where its chasms that flood of glory drank, 
Its waves gushed forth like fire, and as if swayed 
By some mute tempest, rolled on her ; the shade 
Of her bright image floated on the river 
Of liquid light, which then did end and fade — 
Her radiant shape upon its verge did shiver ; 
Aloft, her flowing hair like strings of flame did quiver. 

I stood beside her, but she saw me not — 

She looked upon the sea, and skies, and earth ; 

Rapture, and love, and admiration wrought 

A passion deeper far than tears, or mirth, 

Or speech, or gesture, or whate'er has birth 

From common joy ; which, with the speechless 

feeling 
That led her there united, and shot forth 
From her far eyes, a light of deep revealing. 
All but her dearest self from my regard concealing. 

Her lips were parted, and the measured breath 
Was now heard there ; — her dark and intricate 

eyes 
Orb within orb, deeper than sleep or death. 
Absorbed the glories of the burning skies, 
Which, mingling with her heart's deep ecstasies. 
Burst from her looks and gestures ; — and a light 
Of liquid tenderness like love, did rise 
From her whole frame, an atmosphere which quite 
Arrayed her in its beams, tremulous and soft and 

bright. 



SONGS OF LOVE. 85 

She would have clasped me to her glowing frame ; 
Those warm and odorous lips might soon have 

shed 
On mine the fragrance and the invisible flame 
Which now the cold winds stole ; — she would 

have laid 
Upon my languid heart her dearest head ; 
I might have heard her voice, tender and sweet ; 
Her eyes mingling with mine, might soon have fed 
My soul with their own joy. — One moment yet 
I gazed — we parted then, never again to meet ! 

Rez'olt of Islajn, Canto xi. 



TO F. G. 

Her voice did quiver as we parted, 
Yet knew I not that heart was broken 
From which it came, and I departed 
Heeding not the words then spoken. 
Misery — O Misery, 
This world is all too wide for thee. 

1817. 



FIORDISPINA. 

The season was the childhood of sweet June, 
Whose sunny hours from morning until noon 
Went creeping through the day with silent feet, 
Each with its load of pleasure, slow yet sweet ; 



86 SONGS OF LOVE. 

Like the long years of blest Eternity 

Never to be developed. Joy to thee, 

Fiordispina, and thy Cosimo, 

For thou the wonders of the depth canst know 

Of this unfathomable flood of hours, 

Sparkling beneath the heaven which embowers — 



They were two cousins, almost like to twins, 
Except that from the catalogue of sins 
Nature had rased their love — which could not be 
But by dissevering their nativity. 
And so they grew together like two flowers 
Upon one stem, which the same beams and showers 
Lull or awaken in their purple prime, 
Which the same hand will gather — the same clime 
Shake with decay. This fair day smiles to see 
All those who love — and who e'er loved like thee, 
Fiordispina? Scarcely Cosimo, 
Within whose bosom and whose brain now glow 
The ardors of a vision which obscure 
The very idol of its portraiture. 
He faints, dissolved into a sea of love ; 
But thou art as a planet sphered above ; 
But thou art Love itself — ruling the motion 
Of his subjected spirit : such emotion 
Must end in sin or sorrow, if sweet May 
Had not brought forth this morn — your wedding- 
day. 

1820. 



SONGS OF LOVE. 87 



TO NIGHT. 

Swiftly walk over the western wave. 

Spirit of Night ! 
Out of the misty eastern cave, 
Where all the long and lone daylight, 
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, 
Which make thee terrible and dear, — 

Swift be thy flight ! 

Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, 

Star-inwrought ! 
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; 
Kiss her until she be wearied out, 
Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land, 
Touching all with thine opiate wand — 

Come, long sought ! 

When I arose and saw the dawn, 

I sighed for thee ; 
When light rode high, and the dew was gone. 
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree, 
And the weary Day turned to his rest, 
Lingering like an unloved guest, 

I sighed for thee. 

Thy brother Death came, and cried, 

Wouldst thou me ? 
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed. 

Murmured like a noon-tide bee, 
Shall I nestle near thy side ? 
Wouldst thou me ? — And I replied, 

No, not thee ! 



SONGS OF LOVE. 

Death will come when thou art dead, 

Soon, too soon — 
Sleep will come when thou art fled ; 
Of neither would I ask the boon 
I ask of thee, beloved Night — 
Swift be thine approaching flight, 



1821. 



A BRIDAL SONG. 

The golden gates of Sleep unbar 

Where Strength and Beauty, met together, 
Kindle their image like a star 

In a sea of glassy weather. 
Night, with all thy stars look down, — 

Darkness, weep thy holiest dew, — 
Never smiled the inconstant moon 

On a pair so true. 
Let eyes not see their own delight ; — 
Haste, swift Hour, and thy flight 
Oft renew. 

Fairies, sprites, and angels keep her ! 

Holy stars, permit no wrong ! 
And return to wake the sleeper, 

Dawn, — ere it be long ! 
Oh joy ! oh fear ! what will be done 
In the absence of the sun ! 
Come along ! 

1821. 



Sultan antJ Habtralo. 

A CONVERSATION. 



PREFACE. 

The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme, 
The goats with the green leaves of budding Spring, 
Are saturated not — nor Love with tears. 

Virgil's Gallus. 

Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient fam- 
ily and of great fortune, who, without mixing much in the 
society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent 
palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate 
genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an 
end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But 
it is his weakness to be proud : he derives, from a comparison 
of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that 
surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of 
human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably 
greater than those of other men ; and, instead of the latter 
having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutu- 
ally lent each other strength. His ambition preys upon itself, 
for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. 
I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word 
to express the concentred and impatient feelings which con- 
sume him ; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that 
he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be 
more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is 
cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is 



90 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

a sort of intoxication ; men are held by it as by a spell. He 
has travelled much ; and there is an inexpressible charm in his 
relation of his adventures in different countries. 

Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately 
attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power 
of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of 
which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human 
society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evii 
in the world, he is for ever speculating how good maybe made 
superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things 
reputed holy ; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing 
out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these 
matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox 
opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good 
qualities. How far this is possible the pious reader will deter- 
mine. Julian is rather serious. 

Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems, by his 
own account, to have been disappointed in love. He was evi- 
dently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right 
senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other 
stories of the same kind : the unconnected exclamations of his 
agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text 
of every heart. 



I RODE one evening with Count Maddalo 

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow 

Of Adria towards Venice : a bare strand 

Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, 

Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, 

Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds, 

Is this ; an uninhabited sea-side, 

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried. 

Abandons ; and no other object breaks 

The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes 

Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 91 

A narrow space of level sand thereon, 

Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down. 

This ride was my delight. I love all waste 

And solitary places ; where we taste 

The pleasure of believing what we see 

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be : 

And such was this wide ocean, and this shore 

More barren than its billows ; and yet more 

Than all, with a remembered friend I love 

To ride as then I rode ; — for the winds drove 

The living spray along the sunny air 

Into our faces ; the blue heavens were bare, 

Stripped to their depths by the awakening north ; 

And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth 

Harmonizing with solitude, and sent 

Into our hearts aerial merriment. 

So, as we rode, we talked ; and the swift thought. 

Winging itself with laughter, lingered not. 

But flew from brain to brain, — such glee was ours. 

Charged with light memories of remembered hours. 

None slow enough for sadness : till we came 

Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame. 

This day had been cheerful but cold, and now 

The sun was sinking, and the wind also. 

Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be 

Talk interrupted with such raillery 

As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn 

The thoughts it would extinguish : — 'twas forlorn. 

Yet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell. 

The devils held within the dales of Hell 

Concerning God, freewill and destiny : 

Of all that earth has been or yet may be, 



92 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

All that vain men imagine or believe, 

Or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, 

We descanted, and I (for ever still 

Is it not wise to make the best of ill?) 

Argued against despondency, but pride 

Made my companion take the darker side. 

The sense that he was greater than his kind 

Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind 

By gazing on its own exceeding light. 

Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight, 

Over the horizon of the mountains ; — Oh 

How beautiful is sunset, when the glow 

Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, 

Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy ! 

Thy mountains, seas and vineyards and the towers 

Of cities they encircle ! — it was ours 

To stand on thee, beholding it ; and then, 

Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men 

Were waiting for us with the gondola. — 

As those who pause on some delightful way 

Tho' bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood 

Looking upon the evening and the flood 

Which lay between the city and the shore 

Paved with the image of the sky . . . The hoar 

And aery Alps towards the North appeared 

Thro' mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared 

Between the East and West ; and half the sky 

Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry 

Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew 

Down the steep West into a wondrous hue 

Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent 

Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 93 

Among the many folded hills : they were 

Those famous Euganean hills, which bear 

As seen from Lido thro' the harbor piles 

The likeness of a clump of peaked isles — 

And then — as if the earth and Sea had been 

Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen 

Those mountains towering as from waves of flame 

Around the vaporous sun, from which there came 

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made 

Their very peaks transparent. "^ Ere it fade," 

Said my companion, " I will show you soon 

A better station " — So, o'er the lagune 

We glided, and from that funereal bark 

I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark 

How from their many isles in evening's gleam 

Its temples and its palaces did seem 

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to Heaven. 

I was about to speak, when — " We are even 

Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo, 

And bade the gondolieri cease to row. 

" Look, Julian, on the West, and listen well 

If you hear not a deep and heavy bell." 

I looked, and saw between us and the sun 

A building on an island ; such a one 

As age to age might add, for uses vile, 

A windowless, deformed and dreary pile ; 

And on the top an open tower, where hung 

A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung ; 

We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue : 

The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled 

In strong and black relief — "What we behold 

Shall be the madhouse and its belfrv tower," 



94 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

Said Maddalo, " and ever at this hour 

Those who may cross the water, hear that bell 

Which calls the maniacs each one from his cell 

To vespers." — "As much skill as need to pray 

In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they 

To their stern Maker," I replied. " O ho ! 

You talk as in years past," said Maddalo. 

" ^Tis strange men change not. You were ever still 

Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel, 

A wolf for the meek lambs — if you can't swim 

Beware of Providence." I looked on him, 

But the gay smile had faded in his eye, 

"And such," — he cried, "is our mortality, 

And this must be the emblem and the sign 

Of what should be eternal and divine ! — 

And like that black and dreary bell, the soul 

Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll 

Our thoughts and our desires to meet below 

Round the rent heart and pray — as madmen do ; 

For what ? they know not, till the night of death 

As sunset that strange vision, severeth 

Our memory from itself, and us from all 

We sought and yet were baffled." I recall 

The sense of what he said, altho' I mar 

The force of his expressions. The broad star 

Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill, 

And the black bell became invisible. 

And the red tower looked gray, and all between 

The churches, ships and palaces were seen 

Huddled in gloom : — into the purple sea 

The orange hues of heaven sunk silently. 

We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola 

Conveved me to my lodging by the way. 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 95 

The following morn was rainy, cold and dim. 
Ere Maddalo arose, I called on him. 
And whilst I waited, with his child I played ; 
A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made, 
A serious, subtle, wild, yet gejitle being. 
Graceful without design and unforeseeing. 
With eyes — Oh speak not of her eyes ! — which seem 
Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam 
With such deep meaning, as we never see 
But in the human countenance. With me 
She was a special favorite ; I had nursed 
Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first 
To this bleak world ; and she yet seemed to know 
On second sight her ancient playfellow. 
Less changed than she was by six months or so ; 
For after her first shyness was worn out 
We sate there, rolling billiard balls about. 
When the Count entered — salutations past ; 
" The words you spoke last night might well have cast 
A darkness on my spirit — if man be 
The passive thing you say, I should not see 
Much harm in the religions and old saws 
(Tho' I may never own such leaden laws) 
Which break a teachless nature to the yoke : 
Mine is another faith " — thus much I spoke 
And noting he replied not, added : " See 
This lovely child, blithe, innocent and free, 
She spends a happy time with little care 
While we to such sick thoughts subjected are 
As came on you last night — it is our will 
That thus enchains us to permitted ill — 
We might be otherwise — we might be all 



96 JULIAN AND AfADDALO. 

We dream of happy, high, majestical. 
Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek 
But in our mind ? and if we were not weak 
Should we be less in deed than in desire?" 
" Aye, if we were not weak — and we aspire 
How vainly to be strong ! " said Maddalo : 
"You talk Utopia." "It remains to know," 
I then rejoined, " and those who try may find 
How strong the chains are which our spirit bind ; 
Brittle perchance as straw . . . We are assured 
Much may be conquered, much may be endured 
Of what degrades and crushes us. We know 
That we have power over ourselves to do 
And suffer — what, we know not till we try ; 
But something nobler than to live and die — 
So taught those kings of old philosophy 
Who reigned, before Religion made men blind ] 
And those who suffer with their suffering kind 
Yet feel their faith, religion." " My dear friend," 
Said Maddalo, " my judgment will not bend 
To your opinion, tho' I think you might 
Make such a system refutation-tight 
As far as words go. ' I knew one like you 
Who to this city came some months ago, 
With whom I argued in this sort, and he 
Is now gone mad, — and so he answered me, — 
Poor fellow ! but if you would like to go 
WeUl visit him, and his wild talk will show 
How vain are such aspiring theories." 
" I hope to prove the induction otherwise, 
And that a want of that true theory, still, 
Which seeks a ' soul of goodness ' in things ill, 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 97 



His being — there are some by nature proud, 
Who patient in all else demand but this : 
To love and be beloved with gentleness ; 
And being scorned, what wonder if they die 
Some living death ? this is not destiny 
But man's own wilful ill." 

As thus I spoke 
Servants announced the gondola, and we 
Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea 
Sailed to the island where the madhouse stands. 
We disembarked. The clap of tortured hands, 
Fierce yells and bowlings and lamentings keen, 
And laughter where complaint had merrier been. 
Moans, shrieks, and curses, and blaspheming prayers 
Accosted us. We climbed the oozy stairs 
Into an old court yard. I heard on high. 
Then, fragments of most touching melody, 
But looking up saw not the singer there — 
Through the black bars in the tempestuous air 
I saw, like weeds on a wrecked palace growing. 
Long tangled locks flung wildly forth, and flowing, 
Of those who on a sudden were beguiled 
Into strange silence, and looked forth and smiled 
Hearing sweet sounds. — Then I: "Methinks there 

were 
A cure of these with patience and kind care, 
If music can thus move . . . but what is he 
Whom we seek here ? " " Of his sad history 
I know but this," said Maddalo, " he came 
To Venice a dejected man, and fame 



98 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

Said he was wealthy, or he had been so ; 

Some thought the loss of fortune wrought him woe ; 

But he was ever talking in such sort 

As you do — far more sadly — he seemed hurt, 

Even as a man with his peculiar wrong, 

To hear but of the oppression of the strong, 

Or those absurd deceits (I think with you 

In some respects, you know) which carry through 

The excellent impostors of this earth 

When they outface detection — he had worth. 

Poor fellow ! but a humorist in his way" — 

" Alas, what drove him mad ? " "I cannot say ; 

A lady came with him from France, and when 

She left him and returned, he wandered then 

About yon lonely isles of desart sand 

Till he grew wild — he had no cash or land 

Remaining, — the police had brought him here — 

Some fancy took him and he would not bear 

Removal ; so I fitted up for him 

Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim, 

And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers 

Which had adorned his life in happier hours. 

And instruments of music — you may guess 

A stranger could do little more or less 

For one so gentle and unfortunate, 

And those are his sweet strains which charm the 

weight 
From madmen's chains, and make this Hell appear 
A heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear." — 
"Nay, this was kind of you — he had no claim, 
As the world says " — " None — but the very same 
Which I on all mankind, were I as he 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 99 

Fallen to such deep reverse ; — his melody 

Is interrupted — now we hear the din 

Of madmen, shriek on shriek again begin ; 

Let us now visit him ; after this strain 

He ever communes with himself again, 

And sees nor hears not any." Having said 

These words we called the keeper, and he led 

To an apartment opening on the sea — 

There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully 

Near a piano, his pale fingers twined 

One with the other, and the ooze and wind 

Rushed thro' an open casement, and did sway 

His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray ; 

His head was leaning on a music book. 

And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook ; 

His lips were pressed against a folded leaf 

In hue too beautiful for health, and grief 

Smiled in their motions as they lay apart — 

As one who wrought from his own fervid heart 

The eloquence of passion, soon he raised 

His sad meek face and eyes lustrous and glazed, 

And spoke — sometimes as one who wrote and 

thought 
His words might move some heart that heeded not 
If sent to distant lands : and then as one 
Reproaching deeds never to be undone 
With wondering self-compassion ; then his speech 
Was lost in grief, and then his words came each 
Unmodulated, cold, expressionless ; 
But that from one jarred accent you might guess 
It was despair made them so uniform : 
And all the while the loud and gusty storm 



100 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

Hissed thro"' the window, and we stood behind 
Stealing his accents from the envious wind 
Unseen. I yet remember what he said 
Distinctly: such impression his words made. 

' Month after month/ he cried, ' to bear this load 
And as a jade urged by the whip and goad 
To drag life on, which like a heavy chain 
Lengthens behind with many a link of pain ! — 
And not to speak my grief — O not to dare 
To give a human voice to my despair, 
But live and move, and wretched thing ! smile on 
As if I never went aside to groan, 
And wear this mask of falsehood even to those 
Who are most dear — not for my own repose — 
Alas 1 no scorn or pain or hate could be 
So heavy as that falsehood is to me — 
But that I cannot bear more altered faces 
Than needs must be, more changed and cold embraces, 
More misery, disappointment and mistrust 
To own me for their father . . . Would the dust 
Were covered in upon my body now ! 
That the life ceased to toil within my brow ! 
And then these thoughts would at the least be fled ; 
Let us not fear such pain can vex the dead. 

' What Power delights to torture us ? I know 
That to myself I do not wholly owe 
What now I suffer, tho' in part I may. 
Alas ! none strewed sweet flowers upon the way 
Where wandering heedlessly, I met pale Pain 
My shadow, which will leave me not again — 
If I have erred, there was no joy in error, 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. lOi 

But pain and insult and unrest and terror ; 

I have not as some do, bought penitence 

With pleasure, and a dark yet sweet offence, 

For then, — if love and tenderness and truth 

Had overlived hope's momentary youth, 

My creed should have redeemed me from repenting, 

But loathed scorn and outrage unrelenting 

Met love excited by far other seeming 

Until the end was gained ... as one from dreaming 

Of sweetest peace, I woke, and found my state 

Such as it is. — 

' O Thou, my spirit's mate 
Who, for thou art compassionate and wise, 
Wouldst pity me from thy most gentle eyes 
If this sad writing thou shouldst ever see — 
My secret groans must be unheard by thee, 
Thou wouldst weep tears bitter as blood to know 
Thy lost friend's incommunicable woe. 

'■ Ye few by whom my nature has been weighed 
In friendship, let me not that name degrade 
By placing on your hearts the secret load 
Which crushes mine to dust. There is one road 
To peace and that is truth, which follow ye ! 
Love sometimes leads astray to misery. 
Yet think not tho' subdued — and I may well 
Say that I am subdued — that the full Hell 
Within me would infect the untainted breast 
Of sacred nature with its own unrest ; 
As some perverted beings think to find 
In scorn or hate a medicine for the mind 
Which scorn or hate have wounded — O how vain ! 



102 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

The dagger heals not but may rend again. . . . 
BeUeve that I am ever still the same 
In creed as in resolve, and what may tame 
My heart, must leave the understanding free, 
Or all would sink in this keen agony — 
Nor dream that I will join the vulgar cry, 
Or with my silence sanction tyranny. 
Or seek a moment's shelter from my pain 
In any madness which the world calls gain, 
Ambition or revenge or thoughts as stern 
As those which make me what I am, or turn 
To avarice or misanthropy or lust. . . . 
Heap on me soon, O grave, thy welcome dust ! 
Till then the dungeon may demand its prey, 
And Poverty and Shame may meet and say — 
Halting beside me on the public way — 
' That love-devoted youth is ours — let's sit 
Beside him — he may live some six months yet.' 
Or the red scaiTold, as our country bends, 
May ask some willing victim, or ye, friends. 
May fall under some sorrow which this heart 
Or hand may share or vanquish or avert ; 
I am prepared : in truth with no proud joy 
To do or suffer aught, as when a boy 
I did devote to justice and to love 
My nature, worthless now ! . . . 

' I must remove 
A veil from my pent mind. 'Tis torn aside ! 
O, palUd as Death's dedicated bride, 
Thou mockery which art sitting by my side, 
Am I not wan like thee ? at the grave's call 
I haste, invited to thy wedding-ball 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 103 

To greet the ghastly paramour, for whom 

Thou hast deserted me . . . and made the tomb 

Thy bridal bed ... but I beside your feet 

Will lie and watch ye from my winding sheet — 

Thus . . . wide awake tho' dead . . . yet stay O stay ! 

Go not so soon — I know not what I say — 

Hear but my reasons ... I am mad, I fear, 

My fancy is overwrought . . . thou art not here . . . 

Pale art thou, 'tis most true . . . but thou art gone, 

Thy work is finished ... I am left alone ! — 

' Nay, was it I who wooed thee to this breast 
Which, like a serpent thou envenomest 
As in repayment of the warmth it lent ? 
Didst thou not seek me for thine own content ? 
Did not thy love awaken mine ? I thought 
That thou wert she who said ' You kiss me not 
Ever, I fear you do not love me now — 
In truth I loved even to my overthrow 
Her, who would fain forget these words : but they 
Cling to her mind, and cannot pass away. 

'■ You say that I am proud — that when I speak 
My lip is tortured with the wrongs which break 
The spirit it expresses. . . . Never one 
Humbled himself before, as I have done ! 
Even the instinctive worm on which we tread 
Turns, tho' it wound not — then with prostrate head 
Sinks in the dust and writhes like me — and dies ? 
No : wears a living death of agonies ! 
As the slow shadows of the pointed grass 



I04 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

Mark the eternal periods, his pangs pass 
Slow, ever-moving, — making moments be 
As mine seem — each an immortality ! 



^ That you had never seen me — never heard 
My voice, and more than all had ne'er endured 
The deep pollution of my loathed embrace — 
That your eyes ne'er had lied love in my face — 
That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out 
The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root 
With mine own quivering fingers, so that ne'er 
Our hearts had for a moment mingled there 
To disunite in horror — these were not 
With thee, like some suppressed and hideous thought 
Which flits athwart our musings, but can find 
No rest within a pure and gentle mind . . . 
Thou sealedst them with many a bare broad word 
And searedst my memory o'er them, — for I heard 
And can forget not . . . they were ministered 
One after one, those curses. Mix them up 
Like self-destroying poisons in one cup, 
And they will make one blessing which thou ne'er 
Didst imprecate for, on me, — death. 

' It were 
A cruel punishment for one most cruel 
If such can love, to make that love the fuel 
Of the mind's hell; hate, scorn, remorse, despair: 
But me — whose heart a stranger's tear might wear 
As water-drops the sandy fountain-stone, 
Who loved and pitied all things, and could moan 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. . 105 

For woes which others hear not, and could see 

The absent with the glance of phantasy, 

And with the poor and trampled sit and weep, 

Following the captive to his dungeon deep ; 

Me — who am as a nerve o'er which do creep 

The else unfelt oppressions of this earth, 

And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth, 

When all beside was cold — that thou on me 

Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony — 

Such curses are from lips once eloquent 

With love's too partial praise — let none relent 

Who intend deeds too dreadful for a name 

Henceforth, if an example for the same 

They seek ... for thou on me lookedst so, and so — 

And didst speak thus . . . and thus ... I live to show 

How much men bear and die not ! 



< Thou wilt tell 
With the grimace of hate how horrible 
It was to meet my love when thine grew less ; 
Thou wilt admire how I could e'er address 
Such features to love's work . . . this taunt, tho' true, 
(For indeed nature nor in form nor hue 
Bestowed on me her choicest workmanship) 
Shall not be thy defence . . . for since thy lip 
Met mine first, years long past, since thine eye kindled 
With soft fire under mine, I have not dwindled 
Nor changed in mind or body, or in aught 
But as love changes what it loveth not 
After long years and many trials. 



io6 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

' How vain 
Are words ! I thought never to speak again, 
Not even in secret, — not to my own heart — 
But from my lips the unwilling accents start, 
And from my pen the words flow as I write. 
Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears ... my sight 
Is dim to see that charactered in vain 
On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain 
And eats into it . . . blotting all things fair 
And wise and good which time had written there. 

' Those who inflict must suffer, for they see 
The work of their own hearts and this must be 
Our chastisement or recompense — O child ! 
I would that thine were like to be more mild 
For both our wretched sakes ... for thine the most 
Who feelest already all that thou hast lost 
Without the power to wish it thine again ; 
And as slow years pass, a funereal train 
Each with the ghost of some lost hope or friend 
Following it like its shadow, wilt thou bend 
No thought on my dead memory? 

' Alas, love ! 
Fear me not . . . against thee I would not move 
A finger in despite. Do I not live 
That thou mayest have less bitter cause to grieve ? 
I give thee tears for scorn and love for hate ; 
And that thy lot may be less desolate 
Than his on whom thou tramplest, I refrain 
From that sweet sleep which medicines all pain. 
Then, when thou speakest of me, never say 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 107 

He- could forgive not. Here I cast away 

All human passions, all revenge, all pride ; 

I think, speak, act no ill ; I do but hide 

Under these words like embers, every spark 

Of that which has consumed me — quick and dark 

The grave is yawning ... as its roof shall cover 

My limbs with dust- and worms under and over 

So let Oblivion hide this grief . . . the air 

Closes upon my accents, as despair 

Upon my heart — let death upon despair ! ' 

He ceased, and overcome leant back awhile, 
Then rising, with a melancholy smile 
Went to a sofa, and lay down, and slept 
A heavy sleep, and in his dreams he wept 
And muttered some familiar name, and we 
Wept without shame in his society. 
I think I never was impressed so much ; 
The man who were not, must have lacked a touch 
Of human nature . . . then we lingered not, 
Although our argument was quite forgot. 
But calling the attendants, went to dine 
At Maddalo's ; yet neither cheer nor wine 
Could give us spirits, for we talked of him 
And nothing else, till daylight made stars dim ; 
And we agreed his was some dreadful ill 
Wrought on him boldly, yet unspeakable. 
By a dear friend ; some deadly change in love 
Of one vowed deeply w^hich he dreamed not of; 
For whose sake he, it seemed, had fixed a blot 
Of falsehood on his mind which flourished not 
But in the light of all-beholding truth, 



io8 JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

And having stamped this canker on his youth 
She had abandoned him — and how much more 
Might be his woe, we guessed not — he had store 
Of friends and fortune once, as we could guess 
From his nice habits and his gentleness ; 
These were now lost ... it were a grief indeed 
If he had changed one unsustaining reed 
For all that such a man might else adorn 
The colors of his mind seemed yet unworn ; 
For the wild language of his grief was high, 
Such as in measure were called poetry. 
And I remember one remark which then 
Maddalo made. He said : '• Most wretched men 
Are cradled into poetry by wrong, 
They learn in suffering what they teach in song." 

If I had been an unconnected man 
I, from this moment, should have formed some plan 
Never to leave sweet Venice, — for to me 
It was delight to ride by the lone sea ; 
And then, the town is silent — one may write 
Or read in gondolas by day or night. 
Having the little brazen lamp alight, 
Unseen, uninterrupted ; books are there, 
Pictures, and casts from all those statues fair 
Which were twin-born with poetry, and all 
We seek in towns, with little to recall 
Regrets for the green country. I might sit 
In Maddalo's great palace, and his wit 
And subtle talk would cheer the winter night 
And make me know myself, and the firelight 
Would flash upon our faces, till the day 



JULIAN AND MADDALO. 109 

Might dawn and make" me wonder at my stay : 

But I had friends in London, too : the chief 

Attraction here, was that I sought relief 

From the deep tenderness that maniac wrought 

Within me — 'twas perhaps an idle thought — 

But I imagined that if day by day 

I watched him, and but seldom went away, 

And studied all the beatings of his heart 

With zeal, as men study some stubborn art 

For their own good, and could by patience find 

An entrance to the caverns of his mind, 

I might reclaim him from this dark estate : 

In friendships I had been most fortunate — 

Yet never saw I one whom I would call 

More willingly my friend ; and this was all 

Accomplished not ; such dreams of baseless good 

Oft come and go in crowds and solitude 

And leave no tra,ce — but what I now designed 

Made for long years impression on my mind. 

The following morning urged by my affairs 

I left bright Venice. 

After many years 
And many changes I returned ; the name 
Of Venice, and its aspect was the same ; 
But Maddalo was travelling far away 
Among the mountains of Armenia. 
His dog was dead. His child had now become 
A woman ; such as it has been my doom 
To meet with few, a wonder of this earth 
Where there is little of transcendent worth. 
Like one of Shakespeare's women : kindly she, 



no JULIAN AND MADDALO. 

And with a manner beyond courtesy, 

Received her father's friend ; and when I asked 

Of the lorn maniac, she her memory tasked 

And told as she had heard the mournful tale. 

" That the poor sufferer's health began to fail 

Two years from my departure, but that then 

The lady who had left him, came again. 

Her mien had been imperious, but she now 

Looked meek — perhaps remorse had brought her low. 

Her coming made him better, and they stayed 

Together at my father's — for I played 

As I remember with the lady's shawl — 

I might be six years old — but after all 

She left him." . . . "Why, her heart must have been 

tough : 
How did it end ? " " And was not this enough ? 
They met — they parted" — " Child, is there no 

more ? " 
" Something within that interval which bore 
The stamp of why they parted, how they met : 
Yet if thine aged eyes disdain to wet 
Those wrinkled cheeks with youth's remembered 

tears, 
Ask me no more, but let the silent years 
Be closed and cered over their memory 
As yon mute marble where their corpses lie." 
I urged and questioned still, she told me how 
All happened — but the cold world shall not know. 



JPoems of Nature antr Mm. 



MONT BLANC. 

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI. 

The everlasting universe of things 

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, 

Now dark — now glittering — now reflecting gloom - 

Now lending splendor, where from secret springs 

The source of human thought its tribute brings 

Of waters, — with a sound but half its own, 

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume 

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, 

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever. 

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river 

Over its rocks ceaslessly bursts and raves. 

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve — dark, deep Ravine — 
Thou many-colored, many-voiced vale. 
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail 
Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams : awful scene, 
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down 
From the ice gulfs that gird his secret throne, 
Bursting through these dark mountains like the 

flame 
Of lightning thro' the tempest ; — thou dost lie, 
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, 



112 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN 

Children of elder time, in whose devotion 

The chainless winds still come and ever came 

To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging 

To hear — an old and solemn harmony; 

Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep 

Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil 

Robes some unsculptured image ; the strange sleep 

Which when the voices of the desert fail 

Wraps all in its own deep eternity ; — 

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve^s commotion, 

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame ; 

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, 

Thou art the path of that unresting sound — 

Dizzy Ravine ! and when I gaze on thee 

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange 

To muse on my own separate phantasy, 

My own, my human mind, which passively 

Now renders and receives fast influencings, 

Holding an unremitting interchange 

With the clear universe of things around ; 

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings 

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest 

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, 

In the still cave of the witch Poesy, 

Seeking among the shadows that pass by. 

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, 

Some phantom, some faint image ; till the breast 

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there ! 

Some say that gleams of a remoter world 
Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber, 
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber 
Of those who wake and live. — I look on high ; 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 113 

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled 

The veil of life and death ? or do I lie 

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep 

Spread far around and inaccessibly 

Its circles? For the very spirit fails, 

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep 

That vanishes among the viewless gales ! 

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, 

Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene — 

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms 

Pile around it, ice and rock ; broad vales between 

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, 

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread 

And wind among the accumulated steeps ; 

A desert peopled by the storms alone, 

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, 

And the wolf tracks her there — how hideously 

Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, 

Ghastly, and scarred, and riven, — Is this the scene 

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young 

Ruin ? Were these their toys ? or did a sea 

Of fire envelop once this silent snow? 

None can reply — all seems eternal now. 

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue 

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, 

So solemn, so serene, that man may be 

But for such faith with nature reconciled ; 

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal 

Large codes of fraud and woe ; not understood 

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good 

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. 

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams. 

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell 



114 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Within the daedal earth ; lightning, and rain, 
Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, 
The torpor of the year when feeble dreams 
Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep 
Holds every future leaf and flower ; — the bound 
With which from that detested trance they leap ; 
The works and ways of man, their death and birth, 
And that of him and all that his may be ; 
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound 
Are born and die ; revolve, subside and swell. 
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity 
Remote, serene, and inaccessible : 
And this., the naked countenance of earth. 
On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains 
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep 
Like snakes that watch their prey from their far foun- 
tains, 
Slow roUing on ; there, many a precipice, 
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power 
Have piled : dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, 
A city of death, distinct with many a tower 
And wall impregnable of beaming ice. 
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin 
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky 
Rolls its perpetual stream ; vast pines are strewing 
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil 
Branchless and shattered stand ; the rocks, drawn 

down 
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown 
The limits of the dead and living world, 
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place 
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil ; 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. i 

Their food and their retreat forever gone, 
So much of Hfe and joy is lost. The race 
Of man flies far in dread : his work and dwelling 
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream, 
And their place is not known. Below, vast caves 
Shine in the rushing torrent's restless gleam, 
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling 
Meet in the Vale, and one majestic River, 
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever 
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves. 
Breathes its swift vapors to the circling air. 

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high : — the power is 

there, 
The still and solemn powder of many sights, 
And many sounds, and much of life and death. 
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, 
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend 
Upon that Mountain ; none beholds them there. 
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun. 
Or the star-beams dart through them : — Winds con- 
tend 
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath 
Rapid and strong, but silently ! Its home 
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes 
Keeps innocently, and like vapor broods 
Over the snow. The secret strength of things 
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome 
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee ! 
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, 
If to the human mind's imaginings 
Silence and solitude were vacancy ? 

1816. 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN 



THE ALPS AT DAWN. 

Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist, 

As a lake, paving in the morning sky, 

With azure waves which burst in silver light, 

Some Indian vale. Behold it, rolling on 

Under the curdling winds, and islanding 

The peak whereon we stand, midway, around, 

Encinctured by the dark and gloomy forests. 

Dim twilight lawns, and stream-illumined caves, 

And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist ; 

And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains 

From icy spires of sunlike radiance fling 

The dawn, as lifted Ocean's dazzling spray, 

From some Atlantic islet scattered up, / 

Spangles the wind with lamp-like water-drops. 

The vale is girdled with their walls, a howl 

Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines 

Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast. 

Awful as silence. Hark ! the rashing snow ! 

The sun-awakened avalanche ! whose mass, 

Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there 

Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds 

As thought by thought is piled, till some great 

truth 
Is loosened, and the nations echo round. 
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now. 

Pro7n. Unbound. 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN 1 17 

LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE 
EUGANEAN HILLS. 

Many a green isle needs must be 

In the deep wide sea of misery, 

Or the mariner, worn and wan, 

Never thus could voyage on 

Day and night, and night and day, 

Drifting on his dreary way, 

With the solid darkness black 

Closing round his vessel's track ; 

Whilst above, the sunless sky. 

Big with clouds, hangs heavily, 

And behind, the tempest fleet 

Hurries on with lightning feet, 

Riving sail, and cord, and plank. 

Till the ship has almost drank 

Death from the o'er-brimming deep ; 

And sinks down, down, like that sleep 

When the dreamer seems to be 

Weltering through eternity ; 

And the dim low line before 

Of a dark and distant shore 

Still recedes, as ever still 

Longing with divided will. 

But no power to seek or shun, 

He is ever drifted on 

O'er the unreposing wave 

To the haven of the grave. 

What, if there no friends will greet ; 



Il8 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

What, if there no heart will meet 
His with love's impatient beat ; 
Wander wheresoever he may, 
Can he dream before that day 
To find refuge from distress 
In friendship's smile, in love's caress? 
Then 'twill wreak him little woe 
Whether such there be or no : 
Senseless is the breast, and cold, 
Which relenting love would fold ; 
Bloodless are the veins and chill 
Which the pulse of pain did fill ; 
Every little living nerve 
That from bitter words did swerve 
Round the tortured lips and brow, 
Are like sapless leaflets now 
Frozen upon December's bough. 

On the beach of a northern sea 
Which tempests shake eternally, 
As once the wretch there lay to sleep, 
Lies a solitary heap, 
One white skull and seven dry bones, 
On the margin of the stones. 
Where a few gray rushes stand. 
Boundaries of the sea and land : 
Nor is heard one voice of wail 
But the sea-mews, as they sail 
O'er the billows of the gale ; 
Or the whirlwind up and down 
Howling, like a slaughtered town. 
When a king in glory rides 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 119 

Through the pomp of fratricides : 

Those unburied bones around 

There is many a mournful sound ; 

There is no lament for him, 

Like a sunless vapor, dim, 

Who once clothed with life and thought 

What now moves nor murmurs not. 

Aye» many flowering islands lie 

In the waters of wide Agony : 

To such a one this morn was led, 

My bark by soft winds piloted : 

'Mid the mountains Euganean 

I stood listening to the paean, 

With which the legioned rooks did hail 

The sun's uprise majestical ; 

Gathering round with wings all hoar, 

Thro' the dewy mist they soar 

Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven 

Bursts, and then, as clouds of even, 

Flecked with fire and azure, lie 

In the unfathomable sky. 

So their plumes of purple grain. 

Starred with drops of golden rain, 

Gleam above the sunlit woods. 

As in silent multitudes 

On the morning's fitful gale 

Thro' the broken mist they sail. 

And the vapors cloven and gleaming 

Follow down the dark steep streaming, 

Till all is bright, and clear, and still. 

Round the solitary hill. 



I20 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Beneath is spread like a green sea 
The waveless plain of Lombardy, 
Bounded by the vaporous air, 
Islanded by cities fair ; 
Underneath day's azure eyes 
Ocean's nursling, Venice lies, 
A peopled labyrinth of walls, 
Amphitrite's destined halls, 
Which her hoary sire now paves 
With his blue and beaming waves. 
Lo! the sun upsprings behind. 
Broad, red, radiant, half reclined 
On the level quivering line 
Of the waters crystalline ; 
And before that chasm of light, 
As within a furnace bright. 
Column, tower, and dome, and spire, 
Shine like obelisks of fire, 
Pointing with inconstant motion 
From the altar of dark ocean 
To the sapphire-tinted skies ; 
As the flames of sacrifice 
From the marble shrines did rise, 
As to pierce the dome of gold 
Where Apollo spoke of old. 

Sun-girt City, thou hast been 
Ocean's child, and then his queen ; 
Now is come a darker day. 
And thou soon must be his prey, 
If the power that raised thee here 
Hallow so thy watery bier. 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

A less drear ruin then than now, 
With thy conquest-branded brow 
Stooping to the slave of slaves 
From thy throne, among the waves 
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew 
Flies, as once before it flew, 
O'er thine isles depopulate. 
And all is in its ancient state. 
Save where many a palace gate 
With green sea-flowers overgrown 
Like a rock of ocean's own, 
Topples o'er the abandoned sea 
As the tides change sullenly. 
The fisher on his watery way, 
Wandering at the close of day, 
Will spread his sail and seize his oar 
Till he pass the gloomy shore. 
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep 
Bursting o'er the starlight deep, 
Lead a rapid masque of death 
O'er the waters of his path. 

Those who alone thy towers behold 
Quivering through aerial gold, 
As I now behold them here. 
Would imagine not they were 
Sepulchres, where human forms, 
Like pollution-nourished worms 
To the corpse of greatness cling, 
Murdered, and now mouldering : 
But if Freedom should awake 
In her omnipotence, and shake 



122 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

From the Celtic Anarch's hold 
All the keys of dungeons cold, 
Where a hundred cities lie 
Chained like thee, ingloriously, 
Thou and all thy sister band 
Might adorn this sunny land, 
Twining memories of old time 
With new virtues more sublime ; 
If not, perish thou and they. 
Clouds which stain truth's rising day 
By her sun consumed away. 
Earth can spare ye : while like flowers, 
In the waste of years and hours, 
From your dust new nations spring 
With more kindly blossoming. 
Perish ! let there only be 
Floating o'er thy hearthless sea, 
As the garment of thy sky 
Clothes the world immortally, 
One remembrance, more sublime 
Than the tattered pall of Time, 
Which scarce hides thy visage wan ; — 
That a tempest-cleaving Swan 
Of the songs of Albion, 
Driven from his ancestral streams 
By the might of evil dreams. 
Found a nest in thee ; and Ocean 
Welcomed him with such emotion 
That its joy grew his, and sprung 
From his lips like music flung 
O'er a mighty thunder-fit 
Chastening terror : — w^hat though yet 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 123 

Poesy's unfailing river, 
Which thro' Albion winds for ever 
Lashing with melodious wave 
Many a sacred Poet's grave, 
Mourn its latest nursling fled ! 
IVhat though thou with all thy dead 
Scarce can for this fame repay 
Aught thine own, — oh, rather say 
Though thy sins and slaveries foul 
Overcloud a sunlike soul ! 
As the ghost of Homer clings 
Round Scamander's wasting springs ; 
As divinest Shakespeare's might 
Fills Avon and the world with light 
Like omniscient power, which he 
Imaged 'mid mortality ; 
As the love from Petrarch's urn, 
Yet amid yon hills doth burn, 
A quenchless lamp, by which the heart 
Sees things unearthly ; so thou art, 
Mighty spirit ; so shall be 
The City that did refuge thee. 

Lo, the sun floats up the sky 
Like thought-winged Liberty, 
Till the universal light 
Seems to level plain and height ; 
From the sea a mist has spread. 
And the beams of morn lie dead 
On the towers of Venice now. 
Like its glory long ago. 
By the skirts of that gray cloud 



24 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Many-domed Padua proud 
Stands, a peopled solitude, 
'Mid the harvest shining plain, 
Where the peasant heaps his grain 
In the garner of his foe, 
And the milk-white oxen slow 
With the purple vintage strain, 
Heaped upon the creaking wain, 
That the brutal Celt may swill 
Drunken sleep with savage will ; 
And the sickle to the sword 
Lies unchanged, though many a lord, 
Like a weed whose shade is poison, 
Overgrows this region's foison, 
Sheaves of wdiom are ripe to come 
To destruction's harvest home : 
Men must reap the things they sow, 
Force from force must ever flow. 
Or worse ; but "'tis a bitter woe 
That love or reason cannot change 
The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. 

Padua, thou within whose walls 
Those mute guests at festivals. 
Son and Mother, Death and Sin, 
Played at dice for Ezzelin, 
Till Death cried, " I win, I win ! " 
And Sin cursed to lose the wager, 
But Death promised, to assuage her, 
That he would petition for 
Her to be made Vice-Emperor, 
When the destined years were o'er, 
Over all between the Po 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 125 

And the eastern Alpine snow, 
Under the mighty Austrian. 
Sin smiled so as Sin only can, 
And since that time, aye, long before, 
Both have ruled from shore to shore, 
That incestuous pair, who follow 
Tyrants as the sun the swallow, 
As Repentance follows Crime, 
And as changes follow Time. 

In thine halls the lamp of learning, 

Padua, now no more is burning ; 

Like a meteor, whose wild way 

Is lost over the grave of day, 

It gleams betrayed and to betray: 

Once remotest nations came 

To adore that sacred flame. 

When it lit not many a hearth 

On this cold and gloomy earth : 

Now new fires from antique light 

Spring beneath the wide world's might ; 

But their spark lies dead in thee, 

Trampled out by tyranny. 

As the Norway woodman quells, 

In the depth of piny dells, 

One light frame among the brakes. 

While the boundless forest shakes, 

And its mighty trunks are torn 

By the fire thus lowly born : 

The spark beneath his feet is dead, 

He starts to see the flames it fed 

Howling through the darkened sky 

With a myriad tongues victoriously. 



126 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

And sinks down in fear : so thou, 
O Tyranny, beh oldest now 
Light around thee, and thou hearest 
The loud flames ascend, and fearest : 
Grovel on the earth : aye, hide 
In the dust thy purple pride ! 
Noon descends around me now : 
'Tis the noon of autumn^s glow, 
When a soft and purple mist 
Like a vaporous amethyst, 
Or an air-dissolved star 
Mingling light and fragrance, far 
From the curved horizon's bound 
To the point of heaven's profound, 
Fills the overflowing sky ; 
And the plains that silent lie 
Underneath, the leaves unsodden 
Where the infant frost has trodden 
With his morning-winged feet. 
Whose bright print is gleaming yet ; 
And the red and golden vines. 
Piercing with their trellised lines 
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness ; 
The dun and bladed grass no less, 
Pointing from this hoary tower 
In the windless air ; the flower 
Glimmering at my feet ; the line 
Of the olive-sandalled Apennine 
In the south dimly islanded ; 
And the Alps, whose snows are spread 
High between the clouds and sun ; 
And of living things each one ; 
And my spirit which so long 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 127 

Darkened this swift stream of song, 

Interpenetrated lie 

By the glory of the sky : 

Be it love, light, harmony. 

Odor, or the soul of all 

Which from heaven like dew doth fall, 

Or the mind which feeds this verse 

Peopling the lone universe. 

Noon descends, and after noon 

Autumn's evening meets me soon, 

Leading the infantine moon. 

And that one star, which to her 

Almost seems to minister 

Half the crimson light she brings 

From the sunset's radiant springs : 

And the soft dreams of the morn, 

(Which like winged winds had borne 

To that silent isle, which lies 

■•Mid remembered agonies, 

The frail bark of this lone being,) 

Pass, to other sufferers fleeing. 

And its antient pilot. Pain, 

Sits beside the helm again. 

Other flowering isles must be 

In the sea of life and agony : 

Other spirits float and flee 

O'er that gulf: even now, perhaps. 

On some rock the wild wave wraps, 

With folded wings they waiting sit 

For my bark, to pilot it 

To some calm and blooming: cove, 



128 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Where for me, and those I love, 

May a windless bovver be built, 

Far from passion, pain, and guilt, 

In a dell 'mid lawny hills. 

Which the wild sea-murmur fills, 

And soft sunshine, and the sound 

Of old forests echoing round. 

And the light and smell divine 

Of all flowers that breathe and shine : 

We may live so happy there, 

That the spirits of the air. 

Envying us, may even entice 

To our healing paradise 

The polluting multitude ; 

But their rage would be subdued 

By that clime divine and calm. 

And the winds whose wings rain balm 

On the uplifted soul, and leaves 

Under which the bright sea heaves ; 

While each breathless interval 

In their whisperings musical 

The inspired soul supplies 

With its own deep melodies. 

And the love which heals all strife 

Circling, like the breath of life. 

All things in that sweet abode 

With its own mild brotherhood : 

They, not it would change ; and soon 

Every sprite beneath the moon 

Would repent its envy vain. 

And the earth grow young again. 

October 1818. 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 129 



THE WORLD'S WANDERERS. 

Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light 
Speed thee in thy fiery flight, 
In what cavern of the night 

Will thy pinions close now? 

Tell me, moon, thou pale and gray 
Pilgrim of heaven^'s homeless way, 
In what depth of night or day 

Seekest thou repose now ? 

Weary wind, who wanderest 
Like the world's rejected guest, 
Hast thou still some secret nest 
On the tree or billow? 

1820. 



TO THE MOON. 

Art thou pale for weariness 
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth. 

Wandering companionless 
Among the stars that have a different birth, — 
And ever changing, like a joyless eye 
That finds no object worth its constancy? 

1820. 



130 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 
STANZAS. 

WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, NEAR NAPLES. 

The sun is warm, the sky is clear, * 

The waves are dancing fast and bright, 

Blue isles and snowy mountains wear 
The purple noon's transparent might, 
The breath of the moist earth is light, 

Around its unexpanded buds ; 
Like many a voice of one delight, 

The winds, the birds, the ocean floods. 
The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's. 

I see the Deep's untrampled floor 

With green and purple seaweeds strown ; 
I see the waves upon the shore. 

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown : 

I sit upon the sands alone, 
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean 

Is flashing round me, and a tone 
Arises from its measured motion. 
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion. 

Alas! I have nor hope nor health. 

Nor peace within nor calm around, 
Nor that content surpassing wealth 

The sage in meditation found. 

And walked with inward glory crowned — 
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. 

Others I see whom these surroufid — 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 1 31 

Smiling they live and call life pleasure ; — 
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. 

Yet now despair itself is mild, 

Even as the winds and waters are ; 
I could lie down like a tired child, 

And weep away the life of care 

Which I have borne and yet must bear, 
Till death like sleep might steal on me. 

And I might feel in the warm air 
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. 

Some might lament that I were cold. 

As I, when this sweet day is gone, 
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, 

Insults with this untimely moan ; 

They might lament — for I am one 
Whom men love not, — and yet regret. 

Unlike this day, which, when the sun 
Shall on its stainless glory set. 
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet. 

1818. 



A FRAGMENT. 

Ye gentle visitations of calm thought — 
Moods like the memories of happier earth. 
Which come arrayed in thoughts of little worth, 

Like stars in clouds by the weak winds enwrought, 
But that the clouds depart and stars remain. 
While they remain, and ye, alas, depart! 



132 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 



THE FOREST AT EVENING. 

In silence then they took the way 

Beneath the forest's solitude. 

It was a vast and antique wood, 

Thro' which they took their way ; 

And the gray shades of evening 

O'er that green wilderness did fling 

Still deeper solitude. 

Pursuing still the path that wound 

The vast and knotted trees around 

Thro' which slow shades were wandering, 

To a deep lawny dell they came, 

To a stone seat beside a spring, 

O'er which the columned wood did frame 

A roofless temple, like the fane 

Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain, 

Man's early race once knelt beneath 

The overhanging deity. 

O'er this fair fountain hung the sky, 

Now spangled with rare stars. The snake, 

The pale snake, that with eager breath 

Creeps here his noontide thirst to slake. 

Is beaming with many a mingled hue, 

Shed from yon dome's eternal blue. 

When he floats on that dark and lucid flood 

In the light of his own loveliness ; 

And the birds that in the fountain dip 

Their plumes, with fearless fellowship 

Above and round him wheel and hover. 

The fitful wind is heard to stir 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 1 33 

One solitary leaf on high ; 

The chirping of the grasshopper 

Fills every pause. There is emotion 

In all that dwells at noontide here : 

Then, thro' the intricate wild wood, 

A maze of life and light and motion 

Is woven. But there is stillness now : 

Gloom, and the trance of Nature now : 

The snake is in his cave asleep ; 

The birds are on the branches dreaming: 

Only the shadows creep : 

Only the glow-worm is gleaming : 

Only the owls and the nightingales 

Wake in this dell when daylight fails, 

And gray shades gather in the woods : 

And the owls have all fled far away 

In a merrier glen to hoot and play, 

For the moon is veiled and sleeping now. 

The accustomed nightingale still broods 

On her accustomed bough, 

But she is mute ; for her false mate 

Has fled and left her desolate. 

Rosalind and Helen . 



ITALY AND SORROW. 

Alas ! Italian winds are mild, 

But my bosom is cold — wintry cold — 

When the warm air weaves, among the fresh leaves, 

Soft music, my poor brain is wild. 

And I am weak like a nursling child 

Though my soul with grief is gray and old. 



134 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 



THE ZUCCA. 

I SAW two little dark-green leaves 

Lifting the liglit mould at their birth, and then 

I half- remembered my forgotten dream. 

And day by day, green as a gourd in June, 

The plant grew fresh and thick, yet no one knew 

What plant it was ; its stem and tendrils seemed 

Like emerald snakes, mottled and diamonded 

With azure mail and streaks of woven silver ; 

And all the sheaths that folded the dark buds 

Rose like the crest of cobra-di-capel, 

Until the golden eye of the bright flower 

Through the dark lashes of those veined lids, 

Disencumbered of their silent sleep, 

Gazed like a star into the morning light. 

Its leaves were delicate, you almost saw 

The pulses 

With which the purple velvet flower was fed 

To overflow, and like a poet's heart 

Changing bright fancy to sweet sentiment. 

Changed half the light to fragrance. It soon fell, 

And to a green and dewy embryo-fruit 

Left all its treasured beauty. Day by day 

I nursed the plant, and on the double flute 

Played to it on the sunny winter days 

Soft melodies, as sweet as April rain 

On silent leaves, and sang those words in which 

Passion makes Echo taunt the sleeping strings ; 

And I would send tales of forgotten love 

Late into the lone night, and sing wild songs 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN 135 

Of maids deserted in the olden time, 

And weep like a soft cloud in April's bosom 

Upon the sleeping eyelids of the plant, 

So that perhaps it dreamed that Spring was come, 

And crept abroad into the moonlight air, 

And loosened all its limbs, as, noon by noon, 

The sun averted less his oblique beam. 

Indian. 
And the plant died not in the frost? 

Lady. 

It grew ; 
And went out of the lattice which I left 
Half open for it, trailing its quaint spires 
Along the garden and across the lawn, 
And down the slope of moss and through the tufts 
Of wild-flower roots, and stumps of trees o'ergrown 
With simple lichens, and old hoary stones. 
On to the margin of the glassy pool, 
Even to a nook of unblown violets 
And lilies-of-the-valley yet unborn, 
Under a pine with ivy overgrown. 
And there its fruit lay like a sleeping lizard 
Under the shadows ; but when Spring indeed 
Came to unswathe her infants, and the lihes 
Peeped from their bright green marks to wonder at 
This shape of autumn couched in their recess. 
Then it dilated, and it grew until 
One half lay floating on the fountain wave, 
Whose pulse, elapsed in unlike sympathies, 



136 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Kept time 

Among the snowy water-lily buds. 

Its shape was such as summer melody 

Of the south wind in spicy vales might give 

To some light cloud bound from the golden dawn 

To fairy isles of evening, and it seemed 

In hue and form that it had been a mirror 

Of all the hues and forms around it and 

Upon it pictured by the sunny beams 

Which, from the bright vibrations of the pool, 

Were thrown upon the rafters and the roof 

Of boughs and leaves, and on the pillared stems 

Of the dark sylvan temple, and reflections 

Of every infant flower and star of moss 

And veined leaf in the azure odorous air. 

And thus it lay in the Elysian calm 

Of its own beauty, floating on the line 

Which, like a film in purest space, divided 

The heaven beneath the water from the heaven 

Above the clouds ; and every day I went 

Watching its growth and wondering ; 

And as the day grew hot, methought I saw 

A glassy vapor dancing on the pool, 

And on it little quaint and filmy shapes, 

With dizzy motion, wheel and rise and fall. 

Like clouds of gnats with perfect lineaments. 

An Unfinished Drama. 1822. 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 137 



TO A SKYLARK. 

Hail to thee, blithe spirit ! 

Bird thou never wert, 
That from heaven, or near it, 

Pourest thy full heart 
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 

Higher still and higher 

From the earth thou springest 

Like a cloud of fire ; 

The blue deep thou wingest, 
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 

In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken sun, 
O'er which clouds are brightning, 

Thou dost float and run ; 
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. 

The pale purple even 

Melts around thy flight ; 
Like a star of heaven, 
In the broad day-light 
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 

Keen as are the arrows 

Of that silver sphere. 
Whose intense lamp narrows 

In the white dawn clear. 
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. 



138 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

All the earth and air 

With thy voice is loud, 
As, when night is bare. 
From one lonely cloud 
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is over- 
flovi^ed. 

What thou art we know not ; 

What is most like thee ? 
From rainbow clouds there flow not 
Drops so bright to see, 
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. 

Like a poet hidden 

In the light of thought, 
Singing hymns unbidden. 

Till the world is wrought 
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not : 

Like a high-born maiden 

In a palace tower, 
Soothing her love-laden 

Soul in secret hour 
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower : 



Like a glow-worm golden 

In a dell of dew, 
Scattering unbeholden 
Its aerial hue 
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from 
the view : 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 139 

Like a rose embowered 

In its own green leaves, 
By warm winds deflowered, 
Till the scent it gives 
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged 
thieves : 

Sound of vernal showers 

On the twinkling grass, 
Rain-awakened flowers, 
All that ever was 
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass : 

Teach us, sprite or bird, 

What sweet thoughts are thine : 

I have never heard 
Praise of love or wine 
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. 

Chorus Hymenaeal, 

Or triumphal chaunt, 
Matched with thine would be all 

But an empty vaunt, 
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 

What objects are the fountains 

Of thy happy strain ? 
What fields, or waves, or mountains? 
What shapes of sky or plain ? 
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of 
pain? 



I40 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

With thy clear keen joyance 

Languor cannot be : 
Shadow of annoyance 
Never came near thee : 
Thou lovest ; but ne^er knew love's sad satiety. 



Waking or asleep, 

Thou of death must deem 
Things more true and deep 

Than we mortals dream, 
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream ? 

We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not : 
Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest 
thought. 

Yet if we could scorn 

Hate, and pride, and fear ; 
If we were things born 
Not to shed a tear, 
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 

Better than all measures 

Of delightful sound, 
Better than all treasures 
That in books are found. 
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground ! 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 141 

Teach me half the gladness 

That thy brain must know, 
Such harmonious madness 
From my lips would flow, 
The world should listen then, as I am listening now. 

1820. 



THE NIGHTINGALE. 

Daylight on its last purple cloud 
Was lingering gray, and soon her strain 
The Nightingale began ; now loud. 
Climbing in circles the windless sky, 
Now dying music ; suddenly 
'Tis scattered in a thousand notes. 
And now to the hushed ear it floats 
Like field smells known in infancy, 
Then failing, soothes the air again. 

Rosalind and Helen. 



THE WOODMAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE, 

A WOODMAN whose rough heart was out of tune 
(I think such hearts yet never came to good) 
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon, 

One nightingale in an interfluous wood 
Satiate the hungry dark with melody ; — 
And as a vale is watered by a flood. 



142 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Or as the moonlight fills the open sky 
Struggling with darkness — as a tuberose 
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie 

Like clouds above the flower from which they rose, 
The singing of that happy nightingale 
In this sweet forest, from the golden close 

Of evening, till the star of dawn may fail, 
Was interfused upon the silentness ; 
The folded roses and the violets pale 

Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss 
Of heaven with all its planets ; the dull ear 
Of the night-cradled earth ; the loneliness 

Of the circumfluous waters, — every sphere 
And every flower and beam and cloud and Avave, 
And every wind of the mute atmosphere, 

And every beast stretched in its rugged cave, 
And every bird lulled on its mossy bough, 
And every silver moth fresh from the grave, 

Which is its cradle — ever from below 
Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far, 
To be consumed within the purest glow 

Of one serene and unapproached star, 
As if it were a lamp of earthly light. 
Unconscious, as some human lovers are. 

Itself how low, how high beyond all height 

The heaven where it would perish ! — and every form 

That worshipped in the temple of the night 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 143 

Was awed into delight, and by the charm 

Girt as with an interminable zone, 

Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm 

Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion 
Out of their dreams ; harmony became love 
In every soul but one. 

And so this man returned with axe and saw 
At evening close from killing the tall treen, 
The soul of whom by nature's gentle law 

Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green 
The pavement and the roof of the wild copse, 
Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene 

With jagged leaves, — and from the forest tops 
Singing the winds to sleep — or weeping oft 
Fast showers of aerial water drops 

Into their mother's bosom, sweet and soft, 
Nature's pure tears which have no bitterness ; — 
Around the cradles of the birds aloft 

They spread themselves into the loveliness 
Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers 
Hang like moist clouds : ; — or, where high branches 
kiss. 

Make a green space among the silent bowers, 
Like a vast fane in a metropolis. 
Surrounded by the columns and the towers 

All overwrought with branch-like traceries 
In which there is religion — and the mute 
Persuasion of unkindled melodies. 



144 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Odors and gleams and murmurs, which the lute 
Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast 
Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute, 

Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has past 
To such brief unison as on the brain 
One tone, which never can recur, has cast, 

One accent never to return again. 



The world is full of Woodmen who expel 
Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life, 
And vex the nightingales in every dell. 



THE TOWER OF FAMINE. 

Amid the desolation of a city, 

Which was the cradle, and is now the grave 

Of an extinguished people; so that pity 

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave, 
There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built 
Upon some prison homes, whose dwellers rave 

For bread, and gold, and blood : pain, linked to guilt, 
Agitates the light flame of their hours. 
Until its vital oil is spent or spilt : 

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers 
And sacred domes ; each marble-ribbed roof. 
The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers 



POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 1 45 

Of solitary wealth ; the tempest-proof 

Pavilions of the dark Italian air, 

Are by its presence dimmed — they stand aloof, 

And are withdrawn — so that the world is bare, 
As if a spectre wrapt in shapeless terror 
Amid a company of ladies fair 

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror 
Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue, 
The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error, 
Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew. 

1820. 



EVENING. 

PONTE A MARE, PISA. 

The sun is set ; the swallows are asleep ; 

The bats are flitting fast in the gray air ; 
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep, 

And evening's breath, wandering here and there 
Over the quivering surface of the stream, 
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream. 

There is no dew on the dry grass to-night, 
Nor damp within the shadow of the trees ; 

The wind is intermitting, dry, and light ; 
And in the inconstant motion of the breeze 

The dust and straws are driven up and down. 

And whirled about the pavement of the town. 



146 POEMS OF NATURE AND MAN. 

Within the surface of the fleeting river 
The wrinkled image of the city la}-, 

Immovably unquiet, and for ever 
It trembles, but it never fades away ; 

Go to the . . . 

You, being changed, will find it then as now. 

The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut 
By darkest barriers of cinereous cloud, 

Like mountain over mountain huddled — but 
Growing and moving upwards in a crowd, 

And over it a space of watery blue, 

Which the keen evening star is shining through. 

1821. 



And, like a dying lady, lean and pale. 

Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil, 

Out of her chamber, led by the insane 

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, 

The moon arose up in the murky east, 

A white and shapeless mass. 

1820. 



When soft winds and sunny skies 
With the green earth harmonize. 
And the young and dewy dawn. 
Bold as an unhunted fawn. 
Up the windless heaven is gone, — 
Laugh — for ambushed in the day. 
Clouds and whirlwinds watch their prey. 

1821. 



^oems of ipure Nature. 



PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES. 

Listen, listen, Mary mine, 
To the whisper of the Apennine, 
It bursts on the roof like the thunder"'s roar, 
Or like the sea on a northern shore, 
Heard in its raging ebb and flow- 
By the captives pent in the cave below. 
The Apennine in the light of day 
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray, 
Which between the earth and sky doth lay ; 
But when night comes, a chaos dread 
On the dim starlight then is spread, 
And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm. 

1818. 



THE CLOUD. 

I BRING fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, 
From the seas and the streams ; 

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid 
In their noon-day dreams. 

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken 
The sweet buds every one, 

147 



148 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, 
As she dances about the sun. 

I wield the flail of the lashing hail, 

And whiten the green plains under, 

And then again I dissolve it in rain, 

And laugh as I pass in thunder. 

I sift the snow on the mountains below. 

And their great pines groan aghast ; 
And all the night 'tis my pillow white, 

While I sleep in the arms of the blast. 
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers. 

Lightning my pilot sits, 
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, 

It struggles and howls at fits ; 
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, 

This pilot is guiding me, 
Lured by the love of the genii that move 

In the depths of the purple sea ; 
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, 

Over the lakes and the plains. 
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream. 

The Spirit he loves remains ; 
And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, 

Whilst he is dissolving in rains. 

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, 
And his burning plumes outspread. 

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack. 

When the morning star shines dead, 

As on the jag of a mountain crag, 

Which an earthquake rocks and swings, 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 149 

An eagle alit one moment may sit 

In the light of its golden wings. 
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea 
beneath, 

Its ardors of rest and of love, 
And the crimson pall of eve may fall 

From the depth of heaven above. 
With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest, 

As still as a brooding dove. 

That orbed maiden with white fire laden. 

Whom mortals call the moon. 
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor. 

By the midnight breezes strewn ; 
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet. 

Which only the angels hear. 
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof. 

The stars peep behind her and peer ; 
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, 

Like a swarm of golden bees. 
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent. 

Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, 
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, 

Are each paved with the moon and these. ^ 

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone. 

And the moon's with a girdle of pearl ; 
The volcanos are dim, and the stars reel and swim, 

When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. 
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, 

Over a torrent sea, 
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, 

The mountains its columns be. 



ISO POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

/ 

The triumphal arch through which I march 

With hurricane, fire and snow, 
When the powers of the air are chained to my chair, 

Is the million-colored bow ; 
The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove. 

While the moist earth was laughing below. 

I am the daughter of earth and water, 

And the nursling of the sky ; 
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores ; 

I change, but I cannot die. 
For after the rain when with never a stain. 

The pavilion of heaven is bare. 
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex 
gleams, 

Build up the blue dome of air, 
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph. 

And out of the caverns of rain, 
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the 
tomb, 

I arise and unbuild it again. 

1820. 



THE DAWN. 

The pale stars are gone ! 

For the sun, their swift shepherd, 

To their folds them compelling. 

In the depths of the dawn, 

Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee 

Beyond his blue dwelling, 

As fawns flee the leopard. 

Prom. Unbound. 



POEMS OF rURE NATURE. 15 1 



DAWN AND DESIRE. 

My coursers are fed with the lightning, 
They drink of the whirlwind's stream, 

And when the red morning is brightening 
They bathe in the fresh sunbeam ; 
They have strength for their swiftness I deem. 

I desire : and their speed makes night kindle ; 
I fear : they outstrip the Typhoon ; 

Ere the cloud piled on Atlas can dwindle . 
We encircle the earth and the moon : 
We shall rest from long labors at noon. 

On the brink of the night and the morning 
My coursers are wont to respire ; 

But the Earth has just whispered a warning 
That their flight must be swifter than fire : 
They shall drink the hot speed of desire ! 

Prom. Unbound. 



TWILIGHT AND DESIRE. 

The young moon has fed 
Her exhausted horn 
With the sunset's fire : 
The weak day is dead, 

But the night is not born ; 
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire 
While it trembles with fear and delight, 



152 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

Hesperus flies from awakening night, 

And pants in its beauty and speed with light 

Fast-flashing, soft, and bright. 
Thou beacon of love ! thou lamp of the free ! 

Guide us far, far away, 
To climes where now veiled by the ardor of day 
Thou art hidden 
From waves on which weary noon, 
Faints in her summer swoon. 
Between Kingless continents sinless as Eden, 
Around mountains and islands inviolably 
Prankt on the sapphire sea. 

Hellas. 



ALL SUSTAINING LOVE. 

Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all 
We can desire, O Love ! and happy souls, 
Ere from thy vine the leaves of autumn fall, 

Catch thee, and feed from their o''erflowing bowls 
Thousands who thirst for thy ambrosial dew ; — 
Thou art the radiance which where ocean rolls 

Investest it ; and when the heavens are blue 
Thou fillest them ; and when the earth is fair 
The shadow of thy moving wings imbue 

Its deserts and its mountains, till they wear 
Beauty like some bright robe ; — thou ever soarest 
Among the towers of men, and as soft air 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 153 

In spring, which moves the unawakened forest, 
Clothing with leaves its branches bare and bleak, 
Thou floatest among men ; and aye implorest 

That which from thee they should implore : — the weak 

Alone kneel to thee, offering up the hearts 

The strong have broken — yet where shall any seek 

A garment whom thou clothest not? 

Prince Athanase. 1817. 



SONG OF SPIRITS. 

" Where there is one pervading, one alone." 

To the deep, to the deep, 

Down, down ! 
Through the shade of sleep, 
Through the cloudy strife 
Of Death and of Life ; 
Through the veil and the bar 
Of things which seem and are 
Even to the steps of the remotest throne, 

Down, down ! 

While the sound whirls around, 

Down, down ! 
As the fawn draws the hound, 
As the lightning the vapor, 
As a weak moth the taper ; 
Death, despair ; love, sorrow ; 
Time both ; to-day, to-morrow ; 
As steel obeys the spirit of the stone, 

Down, down ! 



154 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

Through the gray, void abysm, 

Down, down ! 
Where the air is no prism, 
And the moon and stars are not, 
And the cavern-crags wear not 
The radiance of Heaven, 
Nor the gloom to Earth given, 
Where there is one pervading, one alone, 



In the depth of the deep 

Down, down ! 
Like veiled lightning asleep. 
Like the spark nursed in embers, 
The last look Love remembers, 
Like a diamond, which shines 
On the dark w^ealth of mines, 
A spell is treasured but for thee alone, 
a! 
Prorjt. Unbound. 



HYMN TO ASIA. 

That light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
That Beauty in which all things work and move. 

Adonais, liv. 

Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle 

With their love the breath between them ; 
And thy smiles before they dwindle 

Make the cold air fire ; then screen them 
In those looks, where whoso gazes 
Faints, entangled in their mazes. 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 155 

Child of Light ! thy limbs are burning 
Thro' the vest which seems to hide them ; 

As the radiant lines of morning 

Thro' the clouds ere they divide them ; 

And this atmosphere divinest 

Shrouds thee wheresoever thou shinest. 

Fair are others ; none beholds thee, 
But thy voice sounds low and tender 

Like the fairest, for it folds thee 

From the sight, that liquid splendor, 

And all feel, yet see thee never, 

As I feel now, lost for ever ! 

Lamp of Earth ! where'er thou movest 
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, 

And the souls of whom thou lovest 
Walk upon the winds with lightness, 

Till they fail, as I am failing, 

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing ! 

ASIA ANSWERS. 

My soul is an enchanted boat. 

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float 
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing ; 

And thine doth like an angel sit 

Beside a helm conducting it, 
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. 

It seems to float ever, forever, 

Upon that many-winding river. 

Between mountains, woods, abysses, 

A paradise of wildernesses ! 



156 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

Till, like one in slumber bound, 

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around, 

Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound. 



ECHO SONG TO ASIA. 

Echoes (jinseeft). ^ 

Echoes we : listen ! 

We cannot stay : 
As dew-stars glisten 

Then fade away — 
Child of Ocean ! 

O, follow, follow ! 

As our voice recedeth 
Thro' the caverns hollow, 

Where the forest spreadeth ; 

{More distant.') 

O, follow, follow ! 
Thro'' the caverns hollow, 
As the song floats thou pursue, 
Where the wild bee never flew. 
Thro' the noon-tide darkness deep, 
By the odor-breathing sleep 
Of faint night-flowers, and the waves 
At the fountain-lighted caves, 
While our music, wild and sweet, 
Mocks thy gently falling feet, 

Child of Ocean ! 

Pro?n. Unbound, 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 157 



THE SPIRITS OF THE EARTH AND 
THE MOON. 

Tone. 

Even whilst we speak 
New notes arise. What is that awful sound? 

Panthea. 

'Tis the deep music of the rolling world 
Kindling within the strings of the waved air, 
i^olian modulations. 

I ONE. 

Listen too, 
How every pause is filled with under-notes, 
Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones, 
Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul, 
As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air 
And gaze upon themselves within the sea. 

Panthea. 

But see where through two openings in the forest 

Which hanging branches overcanopy, 

And where two runnels of a rivulet, 

Between the close moss violet-inwoven. 

Have made their path of melody, like sisters 

Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles, 

Turning their dear disunion to an isle 

Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts ; 



158 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

Two visions of strange radiance float upon 
The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound, 
Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet 
Under the ground and through the windless air. 

lONE. 

I see a chariot like that thinnest boat, 

In which the mother of the months is borne 

By ebbing night into her western cave, 

When she upsprings from interlunar dreams, 

O'er which is curved an orblike canopy 

Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods 

Distinctly seen through that dusk airy veil, 

Regard like shapes in an enchanter's glass ; 

Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold. 

Such as the genii of the thunder-storm 

Pile on the floor of the illumined sea 

When the sun rushes under it ; they roll 

And move and grow as with an inward wind ; 

Within it sits a winged infant, white 

Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow, 

Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost, 

Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds 

Of its white robe, woof of etherial pearl. 

Its hair is white, the brightness of white light 

Scattered in strings ; yet its two eyes are heavens 

Of liquid darkness, which the Deity 

Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured 

From jagged clouds, out of their arrowy lashes, 

Tempering the cold and radiant air around, 

With fire that is not brightness ; in its hand 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 159 

It sways a quivering moon-beam, from whose point 

A guiding power directs the chariot's prow 

Over its wheeled clouds, which as they roll 

Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds, 

Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew. 



Panthea. 

And from the other opening in the wood 

Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony, 

A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres, 

Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass 

Flow, as through empty space, music and light : 

Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, 

Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden, 

Sphere within sphere ; and every space between 

Peopled with unimaginable shapes. 

Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep. 

Yet each inter-transpicuous, and they whirl 

Over each other with a thousand motions. 

Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning. 

And with the force of self-destroying swiftness, 

Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on, 

Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones, 

Intelligible words and music wild. 

With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb 

Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist 

Of elemental subtlety, like light ; 

And the wild odor of the forest flowers, 

The music of the living grass and air, 

The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams 

Round its intense yet self-conflicting speed, 



i6o POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

Seem kneaded into one aerial mass 

Which drowns the sense. Within the orb itself, 

Pillowed upon its alabaster arms, 

Like to a child overwearied with sweet toil, 

On its own folded wings, and wavy hair, 

The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep, 

And you can see its little lips are moving, 

Amid the changing light of their own smiles. 

Like one who talks of what he loves in dream. 

lONE. 

'Tis only mocking the orb's harmony. 

Panthea. 
And from a star upon its forehead, shoot, 
Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears 
With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined. 
Embleming heaven and earth united now, 
Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel 
Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought 
Filling the abyss wdth sun-like lightnings, 
And perpendicular now, and now transverse. 
Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass, 
Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart ; 
Infinite mine of adamant and gold, 
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems, 
And caverns on cr3'Stalline columns poised 
With vegetable silver overspread ; 
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water, springs 
Whence the great sea, even as a child is fed, 
Whose vapors clothe earth's monarch mountain-tops 
With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. l6l 

And make appear the melancholy ruins 
Of cancelled cycles ; anchors, beaks of ships ; 
Planks turned to marble ; quivers, helms, and spears, 
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels 
Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry 
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, 
Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems 
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin ! 
The wrecks beside of many a city vast, 
Whose population which the earth grew over 
Was mortal, but not human ; see, they lie, 
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons, 
Their statues, homes and fanes ; prodigious shapes 
Huddled in gray annihilation, split. 
Jammed in the hard, black deep ; and over these, 
The anatomies of unknown winged things, 
And fishes which were isles of living scale, 
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around 
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust 
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs 
Had crushed the iron crags ; and over these 
The jagged alligator, and the might 
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once 
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, 
And weed-overgrown continents of earth, 
Increased and multiplied like summer worms 
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe 
Wrapt deluge round it like a cloke, and they 
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished ; or some God 
Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried. 
Be not ! And like my words they were no more. 

Prom. Unbound. 



i62 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 



THE MOON AND THE EARTH. 

The Moon. 

Brother mine, calm wanderer, 

Happy globe of land and air. 
Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee, 

Which penetrates my frozen frame, 

And passes with the warmth of flame 
With love, and odor, and deep melody 

Through me, through me ! 

The snow upon my lifeless mountains 

Is loosened into living fountains, 
My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine : 

A spirit from my heart bursts forth, 

It clothes with unexpected birth 
My cold bare bosom : Oh ! it must be thine 
On mine, on mine ! 

Gazing on thee I feel, I know 

Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow. 
And living shapes upon my bosom move : 

Music is in the sea and air, 

Winged clouds soar here and there. 
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of: 
'Tis Love, all Love! 

The Earth. 
It interpenetrates my granite mass. 
Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth 
pass 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 163 

Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers ; 

Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread, 
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead, 

They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers. 



The Moon. 

The shadow of white death has past 

From my path in heaven at last, 
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep ; 

And through my newly-woven bowers, 

Wander happy paramours. 
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep 
Thy vales more deep. 

The Earth. 

As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold 
A half unfrozen dew-globe, green, and gold, 

And crystalline, till it becomes a winged mist. 
And wanders up the vault of the blue day. 
Outlives the noon, and on the sun's last ray 

Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst — 

The Moon. 

Thou art folded, thou art lying 

In the light which is undying 
Of thine own joy, and heaven's smile divine ; 

All suns and constellations shower 

On thee a light, a life, a power 
Which doth array thy sphere ; thou pourest thine 
On mine, on mine ! 



1 64 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 



The Earth. 

I spin beneath my pyramid of night, 

Which points into the heavens dreaming delight, 

Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep ; 
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing. 
Under the shadow of his beauty lying, 

Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth 
doth keep. 

The Moon. 

As in the soft and sweet eclipse, 

When soul meets soul on lovers' lips, 
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull ; 

So when thy shadow falls on me, 

Then am I mute and still, by thee 
Covered ; of thy love. Orb most beautiful, 
Full, oh, too full ! 

Thou art speeding round the sun 
Brightest world of many a one ; 
Green and azure sphere which shinest 
With a light which is divinest 
Among all the lamps of Heaven 
To whom life and light is given ; 
I, thy crystal paramour 
Borne beside thee by a power 
Like the polar Paradise, 
_Magnet-like of lovers' eyes ; 
I, a most enamoured maiden 
Whose weak brain is overladen 
With the pleasure of her love, 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 1 65 

Maniac-like around thee move 

Gazing, an insatiate bride, 

On thy form from every side 

Like a Maenad, round the cup 

Which Agave lifted up 

In the weird Cadmsean forest. 

Brother, wheresoe'er thou soarest 

I must hurry, whirl and follow 

Through the heavens wide and hollow, 

Sheltered by the warm embrace 

Of thy soul from hungry space. 

Drinking from thy sense and sight 

Beauty, majesty, and might, 

As a lover or cameleon 

Grows like what it looks upon, 

As a violet's gentle eye 

Gazes on the azure sky 
Until its hue grows like what it beholds, 

As a gray and watery mist 

Glows like solid amethyst 
Athwart the western mountain it enfolds, 

When the sunset sleeps 
Upon its snow — 

The Earth. 

And the weak day weeps 
That it should be so. 
Oh, gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight 
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light 
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night, 
Through isles for ever calm. 

Prom. Unbound. 



1 66 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

THE MUSIC OF THE WOODS. 

Semichorus I. OF Spirits. 

The path thro' which that lovely twain 
Have past, by cedar, pine, and yew. 
And each dark tree that ever grew, 
Is curtained out from Heaven''s wide blue. 
Nor sun, nor moon, nor wind, nor rain. 
Can pierce its interwoven bowers, 
Nor aught, save where some cloud of dew. 
Drifted along the earth -creeping breeze, 
Between the trunks of the hoar trees, 

Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers 
Of the green laurel, blown anew ; 
And bends, and then fades silently. 
One frail and fair anemone : 
Or when some star of many a one 
• That climbs and wanders thro' steep night. 
Has found the cleft thro' which alone 
Beams fall from high those depths upon 
Ere it is borne away, away, 
By the swift Heavens that cannot stay, 
It scatters drops of golden light. 
Like lines of rain that ne'er unite : 
And the gloom divine is all around ; 
And underneath is the mossy ground. 

Semichorus II. 

There the voluptuous nightingales. 

Are awake thro' all the broad noon-day. 
When one with bliss or sadness fails. 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 167 

And thro' the windless ivy-boughs, 

Sick with sweet love, droops dying away 
On its mate's music-panting bosom ; 
Another from the swinging blossom, 

Watching to catch the languid close 

Of the last strain, then lifts on high 

The wings of the weak melody, 
'Till some new strain of feeling bear 

The song, and all the woods are mute ; 
When there is heard thro' the dim air 
The rush of wings, and rising there ^ 

Like many a lake-surrounded flute, 
Sounds overflow the listener's brain 
So sweet, that joy is almost pain. 

Semichorus I. 

There those enchanted eddies play 
Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw, 
By Demogorgon's mighty law, 
With melting rapture, or sweet awe, 

All spirits on that secret way ; 

As inland boats are driven to Ocean 

Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw : 
And first there comes a gentle sound 
To those in talk or slumber bound, 
And wakes the destined. Soft emotion 

Attracts, impels them : those who saw 
Say from the breathing earth behind 
There steams a plume-uplifting wind 

Which drives them on their path, while they 
Believe their own swift wings and feet 



i68 POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 

The sweet desires within obey : 
And so they float upon their way, 
Until, still sweet, but loud and strong, 
The storm of sound is driven along, 

Sucked up and hurrying : as they fleet 

Behind, its gathering billows meet 
And to the fatal mountain bear 
Like clouds amid the yielding air. 

First Faun. 

Canst thou imagine where those spirits live 
Which make such delicate music in the woods? 
We haunt within the least frequented caves 
And closest coverts, and we know these wilds, 
Yet never meet them, tho' we hear them oft : 
Where may they hide themselves ? 

Second Faun. 

'Tis hard to tell : 
I have heard those more skilled in spirits say, 
The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun 
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave 
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, 
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float 
Under the green and golden atmosphere 
Which noontide kindles thro'' the woven leaves ;' 
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air, 
The which they breathed within those lucent domes, 
Ascends to flow like meteors thro' the night. 
They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed, 



POEMS OF PURE NATURE. 169 

And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire 
Under the waters of the earth again. 

First Faun. 

If such live thus, have others other lives, 
Under pink blossoms or within the bells 
Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep, 
Or on their dying odors, when they die, 
Or in the sunlight of the sphered dew? 

Second Faun. 

Aye, many more which we may well divine. 
But, should we stay to speak, noontide would come, 
And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn, 
And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs 
Of fate, and chance, and God, and Chaos old, 
And Love, and the chained Titan's woful doom. 
And how he shall be loosed, and make the earth 
One brotherhood : delightful strains which cheer 
Our solitary twilights, and which charm 
To silence the unenvying nightingales. 

Prom. Unbound. 18 19. 



Classic Poems; of Nature^ 



HYMN OF APOLLO. 

The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie, 
Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries, 

From the broad moonlight of the sky, 

Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes, — 

Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn, 

Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone. 

Then I arise, and climbing Heaven's blue dome, 
I walk over the mountains and the waves. 

Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam ; 

My footsteps pave the clouds with fire ; the caves 

Are filled with my bright presence, and the air 

Leaves the green earth to my embraces bare. 

The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill 
Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day ; 

All men who do or even imagine ill 
Fly me, and from the glory of my ray 

Good minds and open actions take new might. 

Until diminished by the reign of night. 
170 



CLASSIC POEMS OF NATURE. 171 

I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers 
With their etherial colors ; the Moon's globe 

And the pure stars in their eternal bowers 
Are cinctured with my power as with a robe : 

Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine, 

Are portions of one power, which is mine. 

I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven, 
Then with unwilling steps I wander down 

Into the clouds of the Atlantic even ; 

For grief that I depart they weep and frown : 

What look is more delightful than the smile 

With which I soothe them from the western isle? 

I am the eye with which the Universe 
Beholds itself and knows itself divine ; 

All harmony of instrument or verse, 
All prophecy, all medicine are mine, 

All light of art or nature ; — to my song, 

Victory and praise in their own right belong. 

1820. 



HYMN OF PAN. 

From the forests and highlands 

We come, we come ; 
From the river-girt islands. 

Where loud waves are dumb 

Listening to my sweet pipings. 
The wind in the reeds and the rushes. 
The bees on the bells of thyme. 



172 CLASSIC POEMS OF NATURE. 

The birds on the myrtle bushes, 
The cicale above in the lime, 
And the lizards below in the grass, 
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was, 
Listening to my sweet pipings. 

Liquid Peneus was flowing. 

And all dark Tempe lay 
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing 
The light of the dying day. 

Speeded by my sweet pipings. 
The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns, 

And the Nymphs of the woods and waves, 
To the edge of the moist river-lawns, 

And the brink of the dewy caves. 
And all that did then attend and follow 
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, 
With envy of my sweet pipings. 

I sang of the dancing stars, 

I sang of the daedal Earth, 
And of Heaven — and the giant wars, 
- And Love, and Death, and Birth, — 

And then I changed my pipings, — 
Singing how down the vale of Maenalus 

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed : 
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus ! 

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed : 
All wept, as I think both ye now would. 
If envy or age had not frozen your blood. 

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings. 

1820. 



CLASSIC POEMS OF NATURE. 173 



THE BIRTH OF PLEASURE. 

At the creation of the Earth 
Pleasure, that divinest birth, 
From the soil of Heaven did rise, 
Wrapt in sweet wild melodies — 
Like an exhalation wreathing 
To the sound of air low-breathing 
Through /Eolian pines, which make 
A shade and shelter to the lake 
Whence it rises soft and slow ; 
Her life breathing [limbs] did flow 
In the harmony divine 
Of an ever-lengthening line 
Which enwrapt her perfect form 
With a beauty clear and warm. 

1 8 19. 



ARETHUSA. 

Arethusa arose 

From her couch of snows 
In the Acroceraunian mountains, - 

From cloud and from crag, 

With many a jag, 
Shepherding her bright fountains. 

She leapt down the rocks, 

With her rainbow locks 
Streaming among the streams ; — 



I 74 CLASSIC POEMS OF NA TURE. 

Her steps paved with green 

The downward ravine 
Which slopes to the western gleams : 

And gliding and springing 

She went, ever singing, 
In murmurs as soft as sleep ; 

The Earth seemed to love her, 

And Heaven smiled above her, 
As she lingered towards the deep. 

Then Alpheus bold, 

On his glacier cold. 
With his trident the mountains strook.; 

And opened a chasm 

In the rocks ; — with the spasm 
All Erymanthus shook. 

And the black south wind 

It concealed behind 
The urns of the silent snow, 

And earthquake and thunder 

Did rend in sunder 
The bars of the springs below : 

The beard and the hair 

Of the River-god were 
Seen through the torrent's sweep, 

As he followed the light 

Of the fleet nymph's flight 
To the brink of the Dorian deep. 

" Oh, save me ! Oh, guide me ! 
And bid the deep hide me, 
For he grasps me now by the hair ! " 



CLASSIC POEMS OF NATURE. 175 

The loud Ocean heard, 

To its blue depth stirred, 
And divided at her prayer ; 

And under the water 

The Earth's white daughter 
Fled like a sunny beam ; 

Behind her descended 

Her billows, unblended 
With the brackish Dorian stream : — 

Like a gloomy stain 

On the emerald main 
Alpheus rushed behind, — 

As an eagle pursuing 

A dove to its ruin 
Down the streams of the cloudy wind. 

Under the bowers 

Where the Ocean Powers 
Sit on their pearled thrones, 

Through the coral woods 

Of the weltering floods, 
Over heaps of unvalued stones ; 

Through the dim beams 

Which amid the streams 
Weave a network of colored light ; 

And under the caves, 

Where the shadowy waves 
Are as green as the forest's night : — 

Outspeeding the shark, 

And the sword- fish dark, 
Under the ocean foam, 

And up through the rifts 



176 CLASSIC POEMS OF NATURE. 

Of the mountain clifts 
They past to then- Dorian home. 

And now from their fountains 

In Enna's mountains, 
Down one vale where the morning basks, 

Like friends once parted 

Grown single-hearted, 
They ply their watery tasks. 

At sunrise they leap 

From their cradles steep 
In the cave of the shelving hill ; 

At noon-tide they flow 

Through the woods below 
And the meadows of Asphodel ; 

And at night they sleep 

In the rocking deep 
Beneath the Ortygian shore ; — 

Like spirits that lie 

In the azure sky 
When they love but live no more. 



1820. 



SONG OF PROSERPINE. 

WHILE GATHERING FLOWERS ON THE PLAIN OF ENNA. 

Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth, 
Thou from whose immortal bosom, 

Gods, and men, and beasts have birth, 
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom, 



CLASSIC POEMS OF NATURE. I 77 

Breathe thine influence most divine 
On thine own child, Proserpine. 

If with mists of evening dew 

Thou dost nourish these young flowers 
Till they grow, in scent and hue, 

Fairest children of the hours. 
Breathe thine influence most divine 
On thine own child, Proserpine. 

1820. 



ipoemsi of ^omt Htfe. 



TO MARY SHELLEY. 

Mary clear, that you were here 
With your brown eyes bright and clear, 
And your sweet voice, like a bird 
Singing love to its lone mate 

In the ivy bower disconsolate ; 

Voice the sweetest ever heard ! 

And your brow more . . . 

Than the sky 

Of this azure Italy. 

Mary dear, come to me soon, 

1 am not well whilst thou art far ; 
As sunset to the sphered moon, 
As twilight to the western star, 
Thou, beloved, art to me. 

O Mary dear, that you were here ; 
The Castle echo whispers " Here ! " 



i8i! 



TO WILLIAM SHELLEY. 

(With what truth I may say — 
Roma! Roma! Roma! 
Non e piu come era prima!) 

My lost William, thou in whom 
Some bright spirit lived, and did 



178 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 179 

That decaying robe consume 

Which its kistre faintly hid, 
Here its ashes find a tomb, 

But beneath this pyramid 
Thou art not — if a thing divine 
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine 
Is thy mother's grief and mine. 

Where art thou, my gentle child? 

Let me think thy spirit feeds. 
With its life intense and mild, 

The love of living leaves and weeds. 
Among these tombs and ruins wild ; — 

Let me think that through low seeds 
Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass. 
Into their hues and scents may pass 

A portion 

1819. 



TO WILLIAM SHELLEY. 

Thy little footsteps on the sands 
Of a remote and lonely shore ; 

The twinkhng of thine infant hands, 

Where now the worm will feed no more : 

Thy mingled look of love and glee 

When we returned to gaze on thee. 



i8o POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 



LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE. 

Leghorn, July i, 1820. 

The spider spreads her webs, whether she be 

In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree ; 

The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves 

His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves ; 

So I, a thing whom moralists call worm. 

Sit spinning still round this decaying form, 

From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought — 

No net of words in garish colors wrought 

To catch the idle buzzers of the day — 

But a soft cell, where when that fades away, 

Memory may clothe in wings my living name 

And feed it with the asphodels of fame. 

Which in those hearts which must remember me 

Grow, making love an immortality. 

Whoever should behold me now, I wist, 
Would think I were a mighty mechanist, 
Bent with sublime Archimedean art 
To breathe a soul into the iron heart 
Of some machine portentous, or strange gin, 
Which by the force of figured spells might win 
Its way over the sea, and sport therein ; 
For round the walls are hung dread engines, such 
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch 
Ixion or the Titan ; — or the quick 
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic, 
To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic, 
Or those in philanthropic council met, 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE, l8i 

Who thought to pay some interest for the debt 
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation, 
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation 
To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest 
Who made our land an island of the blest, 
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire 
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire : — 
With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and 

jag, 
Which fishers found under the utmost crag 
Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles. 
Where to the sky the rude sea rarely smiles 
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn 
When the exulting elements in scorn 
Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay 
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey, 
As panthers sleep ; — and other strange and dread 

Magical forms the brick floor overspread 

Proteus transformed to metal did not make 

More figures, or more strange ; nor did he take 

Such shapes of unintelligible brass, 

Or heap himself in such a horrid mass 

Of tin and iron not to be understood ; 

And forms of unimaginable wood, 

To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood : 

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved 

blocks, 
The elements of what will stand the shocks 
Of wave and wind and time. — Upon the table 
More knacks and quips there be than I am able 
To catalogize in this verse of mine : — 
A pretty bowl of wood — not full of wine, 



t82 poems of home life. 

But quicksilver ; that dew which the gnomes drink 
When at their subterranean toil they swink, 
Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who 
Reply to them in lava — cry halloo ! 
And call out to the cities o'er their head, — 
Roofs, towers and shrines, the dying and the dead, 
Crash through the chinks of earth — and then all 

quaff 
Another rouse; and hold their sides and laugh. 
This quicksilver no gnome has drunk — within 
The walnut bowl it lies, veined and thin. 
In color like the wake of light that stains 
The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains 
The inmost shower of its white fire — the breeze 
Is still — blue heaven smiles over the pale seas. 
And in this bowl of quicksilver — for I 
Yield to the impulse of an infancy 
Outlasting manhood — I have made to float 
A rude idealism of a paper boat : — 
A hollow screw with cogs — Henry will know 
The thing I mean and laugh at me, — if so 
He fears not I should do more mischief. — Next 
Lie bills and calculations much perplext. 
With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint 
Traced over them in blue and yellow paint. 
Then comes a range of mathematical 
Instruments, for plans nautical and statical ; 
A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass 
With ink in it ; — a china cup that was 
What it will never be again, I think, 
A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink 
The liquor doctors rail at — and which I 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 183 

Will quaff in spite of them — and when we die 
We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea, 
And cry out, — "heads or tails?" where'er we be. 
Near that a dusty paint box, some odd hooks, 
A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, 
Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, 
To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, 
Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray 
Of figures, — disentangle them who may. 
Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie, 
And some odd volumes of old chemistry. 
Near those a most inexplicable thing, 
With lead in the middle — Fm conjecturing 
How to make Henry understand ; but no — 
ril leave, as Spenser says, with many mo. 
This secret in the pregnant womb of time. 
Too vast a matter for so w^ak a rhyme. 

And here like some weird Archimage sit I, 
Plotting dark spells, and devilish enginery. 
The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind 
Which pump up oaths from clergymen, and grind 
The gentle spirit of our meek reviews 
Into a powdery foam of salt abuse. 
Ruffling the ocean of their self-content ; — 
I sit — and smile or sigh as is my bent, 
But not for them — Libeccio rushes round 
With an inconstant and an idle sound, 
I heed him more than them — the thunder-smoke 
Is gathering on the mountains, like a cloak 
Folded athwart their shoulders broad and bare ; 
The ripe corn under the undulating air 



1 84 POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 

Undulates like an ocean ; — and the vines 
Are trembling wide in all their trellised lines — 
The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill 
The empty pauses of the blast ; — the hill 
Looks hoary through the white electric rain, 
And from the glens beyond, in sullen strain, 
The interrupted thunder howls ; above 
One chasm of heaven smiles, like the eye of Love 
On the unquiet world; — while such things are. 
How could one worth your friendship heed the war 
Of worms ? the shriek of the world's carrion jays. 
Their censure, or their wonder, or their praise ? 

You are not here ! the quaint witch Memory sees 
In vacant chairs, your absent images. 
And points where once you sat, and now should be 
But are not. — I demand if ever we 
Shall meet as then we met ; — and she replies, 
Veiling in awe her second-sighted eyes ; 
" I know the past alone — but summon home 
My sister Hope, — she speaks of all to come." 
But I, an old diviner, who knew well 
Every false verse of that sweet oracle. 
Turned to the sad enchantress once again, 
And sought a respite from my gentle pain. 
In citing every passage o'er and o'er 
Of our communion — how on the sea shore 
We watched the ocean and the sky together. 
Under the roof of blue Italian weather ; 
How I ran home through last year's thunder-storm. 
And felt the transverse lightning linger warm 
Upon my cheek — and how we often made 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 185 

Feasts for each other, where good will outweighed 

The frugal luxury of our country cheer, 

As well it might, were it less firm and clear 

Than ours must ever be ; — and how we spun 

A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun 

Of this familiar life, which seems to be 

But is not, — or is but quaint mockery 

Of all we would believe, and sadly blame 

The jarring and inexplicable frame 

Of this wrong world : — and then anatomize 

The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes 

Were closed in distant years ; — or widely guess 

The issue of the earth's great business, 

When we shall be as we no longer are — 

Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war 

Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not ; — or how 

You listened to some interrupted flow 

Of visionary rhyme, — in joy and pain 

Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain. 

With little skill perhaps ; — or how we sought 

Those deepest wells of passion or of thought 

Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years, 

Staining their sacred waters with our tears ; 

Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed ! 

Or how I, wisest lady ! then indued 

The language of a land which now is free. 

And winged with thoughts of truth and majesty, 

Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a cloud, 

And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud, 

" My name is Legion ! " that majestic tongue 

Which Calderon over the desert flung 

Of ages and of nations ; and which found 



1 86 POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 

An echo in our hearts, and with the sound 

Startled oblivion ; — thou wert then to me 

As is a nurse — when inarticulately 

A child would talk as its grown parents do. 

If living winds the rapid clouds pursue, 

If hawks chase doves through the etherial way. 

Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey, 

Why should not we rouse with the spirit's blast 

Out of the forest of the pathless past 

These recollected pleasures? 

You are now 
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow 
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore 
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. 
Yet in its depth what treasures ! You will see 
That which was Godwin, — greater none than he 
Though fallen — and fallen on evil times — to stand 
Among the spirits of our age and land, 
Before the dread tribunal of to co7Jie 
The foremost, — while Rebuke cowers pale and 

dumb. 
You will see Coleridge — he who sits obscure 
In the exceeding lustre, and the pure 
Intense irradiation of a mind. 
Which, with its own internal lightning blind. 
Flags wearily through darkness and despair — 
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, 
A hooded eagle among blinking owls. — 
You will see Hunt — one of those happy souls 
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom 
This world would smell like what it is — a tomb ; 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 187 

Who is what others seem ; his room no doubt 

Is still adorned by many a cast from Shout, 

With graceful flowers tastefully placed about ; 

And coronals of bay from ribbons hung, 

And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung ; 

The gifts of the most learn'd among some dozens 

Of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins. 

And there is he with his eternal puns,. 

Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns 

Thundering for money at a poet's door ; 

Alas ! it is no use to say, " I'm poor ! " 

Or oft in graver mood, when he will look 

Things wiser than were ever read in book, 

Except in Shakespeare's wisest tenderness. — 

You will see Hogg, — and I cannot express 

His virtues, — though I know that they are great, 

Because he locks, then barricades the gate 

Within which they inhabit ; — of his wit 

And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit. 

He is a pearl within an oyster shell. 

One of the richest of the deep ; — and there 

Is English Peacock with his mountain fair 

Turned into a Flamingo ; — that shy bird 

That gleams i' the Indian air — have you not heard 

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, 

His best friends hear no more of him ? — but you 

Will see him, and will like him too, I hope, 

With the milk-white Snowdonian Antelope 

Matched with this camelopard — his fine wit 

Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it ; 

A strain too learned for a shallow age, 

Too Avise for selfish bigots ; let his page 



1 88 POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 

Which charms the chosen spirits of the time, 

Fold itself up for the serener clime 

Of years to come, and find its recompense 

In that just expectation. — Wit and sense, 

Virtue and human knowledge ; all that might 

Make this dull world a business of delight, 

Are all combined in Horace Smith. — And these, 

With some exceptions, which I need not teaze 

Your patience by descanting on, — are all 

You and I know in London. 

I recall 
My thoughts, and bid you look upon the night. 
As water does a sponge, so the moonlight 
Fills the void, hollow, universal air — 
What see you ? — unpavilioned heaven is fair 
Whether the moon, into her chamber gone, 
Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan 
Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep ; 
Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse deep, 
Piloted by the many-wandering blast. 
And the rare stars rush through them dim and 

fast : — 
All this is beautiful in every land. — 
But what see you beside ? — a shabby stand 
Of Hackney coaches — a brick house or wall 
Fencing some lonely court, white with the scrawl 
Of our unhappy politics ; — or worse — 
A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse 
Mixed with the watchman's, partner of her trade, 
You must accept in place of serenade — 
Or yellow-haired Pollonia murmuring 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE. i«9 

To Henry, some unutterable thing. 

I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit 

Built round dark caverns, even to the root 

Of the living stems that feed them — in whose bowers 

There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers ; 

Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn 

Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne 

In circles quaint, and ever changing dance. 

Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance, 

Pale in the open moonshine, but each one 

Under the dark trees seems a little sun, 

A meteor tamed ; a fixed star gone astray 

From the silver regions of the milky way ; — 

Afar the Contadino's song is heard. 

Rude, but made sweet by distance — and a bird 

Which cannot be the Nightingale, and yet 

I know none else that sings so sweet as it 

At this late hour ; — and then all is still — 

Now Italy or London, which you will! 

Next winter you must pass with me ; PU have 
My house by that time turned into a grave 
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care, 
And all the dreams which our tormentors are ; 
Oh! that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith were there 
With every thing belonging to them fair! — 
We will have books, Spanish, Italian, Greek ; 
And ask one week to make another week 
As like his father, as Pm unlike mine. 
Which is not his fault, as you may divine. 
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine. 
Yet let's be merry : we'll have tea and toast ; 



I90 POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 

Custards for supper, and an endless host 

Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, 

And other such lady-like luxuries, — 

Feasting on which we will philosophize! 

And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood, 

To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood. 

And then we'll talk ; — what shall we talk about ? 

Oh ! there are themes enough for many a bout 

Of thought-entangled descant ; — as to nerves — 

With cones and parallelograms and curves 

I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare 

To bother me — when you are with me there. 

And they shall never more sip laudanum, 

From Helicon or Himeros ; — well, come. 

And in despite of God and of the devil. 

We'll make our friendly philosophic revel 

Outlast the leafless time ; till buds and flowers 

Warn the obscure inevitable hours. 

Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew ; — 

" To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 

1820. 



THE AZIOLA. 

" Do you not hear the Aziola cry? 
Methinks she must be nigh," 
Said Mary, as we sate 
In dusk, ere stars were lit, or candles brought ; 
And I, who thought 
This Aziola was some tedious woman, 
Asked, " Who is Aziola ? " How elate 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 19 1 

I felt to know that it was nothing human, 
No mockery of myself to fear or hate : 
And Mary saw my soul, 
And laughed, and said, " Disquiet yourself not ; 
'Tis nothing but a little downy owl." 

Sad Aziola ! many an eventide 

Thy music I had heard 
By wood and stream, meadow and mountain-side, 

And fields and marshes wide, 
Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird, 

The soul ever stirred ; 
Unhke and far sweeter than them all. 
Sad Aziola ! from that moment I 

Loved thee and thy sad cry. 

1821. 



THE BOAT ON THE SERCHIO. 

Our boat is asleep on Serchio''s stream. 

Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream. 

The helm sways idly, hither and thither ; 

Dominic, the boatman, has brought the mast 
And the oars and the sails ; but 'tis sleeping fast, 
Like a beast, unconscious of its tether. 

The stars burnt out in the pale blue air. 
And the thin white moon lay withering there, 
To tower, and cavern, and rift and tree, 
The owl and the bat fled drowsily. 
Day had kindled the dewy woods, 

And the rocks above and the stream below, 



192 POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 

And the vapors in their muhitudes, 

And the Apennine's shroud of summer snoWj 
And clothed with hght of aery gold 
The mists in their eastern caves uprolled. 

Day had awakened all things that be, 

The lark and the thrush and the swallow free, 

And the milkmaid's song and the mower's scythe, 
And the matin-bell and the mountain bee : 
Fire-flies were qilenched on the dewy corn. 

Glow-worms went out on the river's brim, 

Like lamps which a student forgets to trim : 
The beetle forgot to wind his horn. 

The crickets were still in the meadow and hill : 
Like a flock of rooks at a farmer's gun 
Night's dreams and terrors, every one. 
Fled from the brains which are their prey 
From the lamp's death to the morning ray. 



Who shaped us to his ends and not our own ; 
The million rose to learn, and one to teach 

What none yet ever knew or can be known. 
And many rose 

Whose woe was such that fear became desire ; 
Melchior and Lionel were not among those ; 
They from the throng of men had stepped aside. 
And made their home under the green hill side. 
It was that hill, whose intervening brow 

Screens Lucca from the Pisan's envious eye, 
Which the circumfluous plain waving below. 

Like a wide lake of green fertility. 



POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 193 

With streams and fields and marshes bare, 

Divides from the far Apennines — which lie 
Islanded in the immeasurable air. 



" What think you, as she lies in her green cove, 

Our little sleeping boat is dreaming of ? '' 

" If morning dreams are true, why I should guess 

That she was dreaming of our idleness, 

And of the miles of watery way 

We should have led her by this time of day." — 

" Never mind," said Lionel, 
"Give care to the winds, they can bear it well 
About yon poplar tops ; and see ! 
The white clouds are driving merrily, 
And the stars we miss this morn will light 
More willingly our return to-night. — 
How it whistles, Dominic's long black hair ! 
List, my dear fellow ; the breeze blows fair : 
Hear how it sings into the air." 



The chain is loosed, the sails are spread, 

The living breath is fresh behind. 
As with dews and sunrise fed. 

Comes the laughing morning wind ; — 
The sails are full, the boat makes head 
Against the Serchio's torrent fierce. 
Then flags with intermitting course. 

And hangs upon the wave, and stems 

The tempest of the .... 
Which fervid from its mountain source 



194 POEMS OF HOME LIFE. 

Shallow, smooth and strong doth come, — 

Swift as fire, tempestuously 

It sweeps into the affrighted sea ; 

In morning's smile its eddies coil, 

Its billows sparkle, toss and boil, 

Torturing all its quiet light 

Into columns fierce and bright. 

The Serchio, twisting forth 
Between the marble barriers which it clove 

At Ripafratta, leads through the dead chasm 
The wave that died the death which lovers love, 

Living in what it sought ; as if this spasm 
Had not yet past, the toppling mountains cling, 

But the clear stream in full enthusiasm 
Pours itself on the plain, then wandering 

Down one clear path of effluence crystalline, 
Sends its superfluous waves, that they may fling 

At Arno's feet tribute of corn and wine. 
Then, through the pestilential deserts wild 

Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted pine, 

It rushes to the Ocean. 

1821. 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

TO MARY. 

(on her objecting to the following poem, upon the 

SCORE of its containing NO HUMAN INTEREST.) 

How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten 

(For vipers kill, though dead), by some review, 

That you condemn these verses I have written, 
Because they tell no story, false or true ! 

What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, 
May it not leap and play as grown cats do. 

Till its claws come ? Prithee, for this one time, 

Content thee with a visionary rhyme. 

What hand would crush the silken-winged fly, 
The youngest of inconstant April's minions. 

Because it cannot climb the purest sky, 

Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions? 

Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die, 
When day shall hide within her twilight pinions, 

The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile, 

Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile. 

To thy fair feet a winged Vision came, 

Whose date should have been longer than a day, 

And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame. 
And in thy sight its fading plumes display ; 

The watery bow burned in the evening flame, 

But the shower fell, the swift sun went his way — 

195 



196 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

And that is dead. O, let me not believe 

That any thing of mine is fit to live ! 

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years 
Considering and retouching Peter Bell ; 

Watering his laurels with the killing tears 
Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell 

Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the 
spheres 
Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers ; this 
well 

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil 

The over-busy gardener's blundering toil. 

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature 
As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise 

Clothes for our grandsons — but she matches Peter, 
Though he took nineteen years, and she three 
days 

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre 
She wears ; he, proud as dandy with his stays, 

Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress 

Like King Lear's "looped and windowed ragged- 



If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow, 

Scorched by HelPs hyperequatorial climate 

Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow : 

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at ; 

In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello. 

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate 

Can shrive you of that sin, — if sin there be 

In love, when it becomes idolatry. 



Elje amitcl} of atlas. 



Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth 
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time, 

Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth 

All those bright natures which adorned its prime, 

And left us nothing to believe in, worth 
The pains of putting into learned rhyme, 

A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain 

Within a cavern, by a secret fountain. 

Her mother was one of the Atlantides : 
The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden 

In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas 
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden 

In the warm shadow of her loveliness ; — 

He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden 

The chamber of gray rock in which she lay — 

She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away. 

'Tis said, she first was changed into a vapor, 
And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit, 

Like splendor-winged moths about a taper. 
Round the red west when the sun dies in it : 

And then into a meteor, such as caper 
On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit : 

Then, into one of those mysterious stars 

Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars. 

197 



198 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

Ten times the Mother of the Months had bent 
Her bow beside the folding-star, and bidden 

With that bright sign the billows to indent 

The sea-deserted sand — like children chidden, 

At her command they ever came and went — 
Since in that cave a dewy splendor hidden 

Took shape and motion : with the living form 

Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm. 

A lovely lady garmented in light 

From her own beauty — deep her eyes, as are 
Two openings of unfathomable night 

Seen through a tempesfs cloven roof — her hair 
Dark — the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight, 

Picturing her form ; her soft smiles shone afar, 
And her low voice was heard like love, and drew 
All living things towards this wonder new. 

And first the spotted camelopard came. 
And then the wise and fearless elephant ; 

Then the sly serpent, in the golden flame 
Of his own volumes intervolved ; — all gaunt 

And sanguine beasts her gentle looks made tame. 
They drank before her at her sacred fount ; 

And every beast of beating heart grew bold, 

Such gentleness and power even to behold. 

The brinded lioness led forth her young, 

That she might teach them how they should 
forego 

Their inborn thirst of death ; the pard unstrung 
His sinews at her feet, and sought to know, 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 199 

With looks whose motions spoke without a tongue, 

How he might be as gentle as the doe. 
The magic circle of her voice and eyes 
All savage natures did imparadise. 

And old Silenus, shaking a green stick 
Of lilies, and the wood-gods in a crew 

Came, blithe, as in the olive copses thick 
Cicadae are, drunk with the noonday dew : 

And Dryope and Faunus followed quick, 

Teazing the God to sing them something new ; 

Till in this cave they found the lady lone, 

Sitting upon a seat of emerald stone. 

And universal Pan, 'tis said, was there, 

And though none saw him, — through the adamant 
Of the deep mountains, through the trackless air. 

And through those living spirits, like a want 
He passed out of his everlasting lair 

Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant, 
And felt that wondrous lady all alone, — 
And she felt him, upon her emerald throne. 

And every nymph of stream and spreading tree, 
And every shepherdess of Ocean's flocks. 

Who drives her white waves over the green sea, 
And Ocean with the brine on his gray locks. 

And quaint Priapus with his company. 

All came, much wondering how the enwombed 
rocks 

Could have brought forth so beautiful a birth ; — 

Her love subdued their wonder and their mirth. 



200 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

The herdsmen and the mountain maidens came, 
And the rude kings of pastoral Garamant — 

Their spirits shook within them, as a flame 
Stirred by the air under a cavern gaunt : 

Pigmies, and Polyphemes, by many a name, 
Centaurs and Satyrs, and such shapes as haunt 

Wet clefts, — and lumps neither alive nor dead, 

Dog-headed, bosom-eyed, and bird-footed. 

For she was beautiful — her beauty made 

The bright world dim, and every thing beside 

Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade : 
No thought of living spirit could abide. 

Which to her looks had ever been betrayed, 
On any object in the world so wide. 

On any hope within the circling skies, 

But on her form, and in her inmost eyes. 

Which when the lady knew, she took her spindle 
And twined three threads of fleecy mist, and three 

Long lines of light, such as the dawn may kindle 
The clouds and waves and mountains with ; and 
she 

As many star-beams, ere their lamps could dwindle 
In the belated mooi?, wound skilfully ; 

And with these threads a subtle veil she wove — 

A shadow for the splendor of her love. 

The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling 

Were stored with magic treasures — sounds of air, 

Which had the power all spirits of compelling. 
Folded in cells of crystal silence there ; 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 201 

Such as we hear in youth, and think the feehng 

Will never die — yet ere we are aware, 
The feeling and the sound are fled and gone, 
And the regret they leave remains alone. 

And there lay Visions swift, and sweet, and quaint, 
Each in its thin sheath, like a chrysalis, 

Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint 
With the soft burden of intensest bliss ; 

It was its work to bear to many a saint 

Whose heart adores the shrine which holiest is. 

Even Love's : — and others white, green, gray and 
black, 

And of all shapes — and each was at her beck. 

And odors in a kind of aviary 

Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept, 

Clipt in a floating net, a love-sick Fairy 

Had woven from dew-beams while the moon yet 
slept ; 

As bats at the wired window of a dairy. 

They beat their vans ; and each was an adept. 

When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds, 

To stir sweet thoughts or sad, in destined minds. 

And liquors clear and sweet, whose healthful might 
Could medicine the sick soul to happy sleep, 

And change eternal death into a night 

Of glorious dreams — or if eyes needs must weep, 

Could make their tears all wonder and delight. 
She in her crystal vials did closely keep : 

If men could drink of those clear vials, 'tis said 

The living were not envied of the dead. 



202 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device, 
The works of some Saturnian Archimage, 

Which taught the expiations at whose price 
Men from the Gods might win that happy age 

Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice ; 

And which might quench the earth-consuming 
rage 

Of gold and blood — till men should live and move 

Harmonious as the sacred stars above. 

And how all things that seem untamable, 
Not to be checked and not to be confined, 

Obey the spells of wisdom's wizard skill ; 

Time, Earth and Fire — the Ocean and the Wind 

And all their shapes — and man's imperial will ; 
And other scrolls whose writings did unbind 

The inmost lore of Love — let the profane 

Tremble to ask what secrets they contain. 

And wondrous works of substances unknown, 
To which the enchantment of her father's power 

Had changed those ragged blocks of savage stone, 
Were heaped in the recesses of her bower ; 

Carved lamps and chalices, and vials which shone 
In their own golden beams — each like a flower, 

Out of whose depth a fire-fly shakes his light 

Under a cypress in a starless night. 

At first she lived alone in this wild home. 
And her own thoughts were each a minister. 

Clothing themselves, or with the ocean foam, 
Or with the wind, or with the speed of fire, 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 203 

To work whatever purposes might come 

Into her mind ; such power her mighty Sire 
Had girt them with, whether to fly or run. 
Through all the regions which he shines upon. 

The Ocean-nymphs and Hamadryades, 

Oreads and Naiads, with long weedy locks, 

Offered to do her bidding through the seas, 
Under the earth, and in the hollow rocks, 

And far beneath the matted roots of trees. 
And in the gnarled heart of stubborn oaks. 

So they might live for ever in the light 

Of her sweet presence — each a satellite. 

" This may not be," the wizard maid replied : 
" The fountains where the Naiades bedew 

Their shining hair, at length are drained and dried ; 
The solid oaks forget their strength, and strew 

Their latest leaf upon the mountains wide ; 
The boundless ocean like a drop of dew 

Will be consumed — the stubborn centre must 

Be scattered, like a cloud of summer dust. 

" And ye with them will perish, one by one ; — 
If I must sigh to think that this shall be, 

If I must weep when the surviving Sun 

Shall smile on your decay — Oh, ask not me 

To love you till your Httle race is run ; 
I cannot die as ye must — over me 

Your leaves shall glance — the streams in which ye 
dwell 

Shall be my paths henceforth, and so — farewell ! " 



204 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

She spoke and wept : — the dark and azure well 
Sparkled beneath the shower of her bright tears, 

And every little circlet where they fell 

Flung to the cavern-roof inconstant spheres 

And intertangled lines of light ; — a knell 
Of sobbing voices came upon her ears 

From those departing Forms, o'er the serene 

Of the white streams and of the forest green. 

All day the wizard lady sate aloof, 

Spelling out scrolls of dread antiquity, 

Under the cavern's fountain-lighted roof; 
Or broidering the pictured poesy 

Of some high tale upon her growing woof, 

Which the sweet splendor of her smiles could dye 

In hues outshining Heaven — and ever she 

Added some grace to the wrought poesy. 

While on her hearth lay blazing many a piece 
Of sandal wood, rare gums and cinnamon ; 

Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is — 
Each flame of it is as a precious stone 

Dissolved in ever-moving light, and this 
Belongs to each and all who gaze upon. 

The Witch beheld it not, for in her hand 

She held a woof that dimmed the burning brand. 

This lady never slept, but lay in trance 
All night within the fountain — as in sleep. 

Its emerald crags glowed in her beauty's glance ; 
Through the green splendor of the water deep 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 205 

She saw the constellations reel and dance 

Like fire-flies — and withal did ever keep 
The tenor of her contemplations calm, 
With open eyes, closed feet and folded palm. 

And when the whirlwinds and the clouds descended 
From the white pinnacles of that cold hill, 

She past at dewfall to a space extended, 
Where in a lawn of flowering asphodel 

Amid a wood of pines and cedars blended. 
There yawned an inextinguishable well 

Of crimson fire — full even to the brim, 

And overflowing all the margin trim. 

Within the which she lay when the fierce war 
Of wintry winds shook that innocuous liquor 

In many a mimic moon and bearded star 

O'er woods and lawns ; — the serpent heard it 
flicker. 

In sleep, and dreaming still, he crept afar — 
And when the windless snow descended thicker 

Than autumn leaves, she watched it as it came 

Melt on the surface of the level flame. 

She had a Boat, which some say Vulcan wrought 
For Venus, as the chariot of her star; 

But it was found too feeble to be fraught 

With all the ardors in that sphere which are, 

And so she sold it, and Apollo bought 
And gave it to this daughter : from a car 

Changed to the fairest and the lightest boat 

Which ever upon mortal stream did float. 



2o6 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

And others say, that, when but three hours old, 
The first-born Love out of his cradle leapt, 

And clove dun Chaos with his wings of gold, 
And like a horticultural adept, 

Stole a strange seed, and wrapt it up in mould, 
And sowed it in his mother's star, and kept 

Watering it all the summer with sweet dew, 

And with his wings fanning it as it grew. 

The plant grew strong and green, the snowy flower 
Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began 

To turn the light and dew by inward power 
To its own substance ; woven tracery ran 

Of light firm texture, ribbed and branching, o'er 
The solid rind, like a leafs veined fan — 

Of which Love scooped this boat — and with soft 
motion 

Piloted it round the circumfluous ocean. 

This boat she moored upon her fount, and lit 

A living spirit within all its frame, 
Breathing the soul of swiftness into it. 

Couched on the fountain like a panther tame. 
One of the twain at Evan's feet that sit — 

Or as on Vesta's sceptre a swift flame — 
Or on blind Homer's heart a winged thought, — 
In joyous expectation lay the boat. 

Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow 
Together, tempering the repugnant mass 

With liquid love — all things together grow 
Through which the harmony of love can pass ; 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 207 

And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow — 

A hving Image, which did far surpass 
In beauty that bright shape of vital stone 
Which drew the heart out of PygmaHon. 

A sexless thing it was, and in its growth 
It seemed to have developed no defect 

Of either sex, yet all the grace of both, — 

In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked ; 

The bosom lightly swelled with its full youth, 
The countenance was such as might select 

Some artist that his skill should never die, 

Imaging forth such perfect purity. 

From its smooth shoulders hung two rapid wings. 
Fit to have borne it to the seventh sphere, 

Tipt with the speed of liquid lightnings. 
Dyed in the ardors of the atmosphere : 

She led her creature to the boiling springs 

Where the light boat was moored, and said, " Sit 
here ! "' 

And pointed to the prow, and took her seat 

Beside the rudder, with opposing feet. 

And down the streams which clove those mountains 
vast. 

Around their inland islets, and amid 
The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast 

Darkness and odors, and a pleasure hid 
In melancholy gloom, the pinnace past; 

By many a star-surrounded pyramid 



2o8 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky, 

And caverns yawning round unfathomably. 

The silver noon into that winding dell, 

With slanted gleam athwart the forest tops. 

Tempered like golden evening, feebly fell : 

A green and glowing light, like that which drops 

From folded lilies in which glow-worms dwell, 
When earth over her face night's mantle wraps ; 

Between the severed mountains lay on high 

Over the stream, a narrow rift of sky. 

And ever as she went, the Image lay 

With folded wings and unawakened eyes ; 

And o'er its gentle countenance did play 
The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies, 

Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay. 

And drinking the warm tears, and the sweet sighs 

Inhaling, which, with busy murmur vain, 

They had aroused from that full heart and brain. 

And ever down the prone vale, like a cloud ' 
Upon a stream of wind, the pinnace went : 

Now lingering on the pools, in which abode 
The calm and darkness of the deep content 

In which they paused ; now o'er the shallow road 
Of white and dancing waters, all besprent 

With sand and polished pebbles : — mortal boat 

In such a shallow rapid could not float. 

And down the earthquaking cataracts which shiver 
Their snow-like waters into golden air, 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 209 

Or linder chasms unfathomable ever 

Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear 

A subterranean portal for the river, 

It fled — the circling sunbows did upbear 

Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray, 

Lighting it far upon its lampless way. 

And when the wizard lady would ascend 
The labyrinths of some many-winding vale, 

Which to the inmost mountain upward tend — 
She called " Hermaphroditus! " — and the pale 

And heavy hue which slumber could extend 
Over its lips and eyes, as on the gale 

A rapid shadow from a slope of grass. 

Into the darkness of the stream did pass. 

And it unfurled its heaven-colored pinions. 
With stars of fire spotting the stream below ; 

And from above into the Sun's dominions 
Flinging a glory, like the golden glow 

In which spring clothes her emerald-winged minions. 
All interwoven with fine feathery snow 

And moonlight splendor of intensest rime, 

With which frost paints the pines in winter time. 

And then it winnowed the Elysian air 
Which ever hung about that lady bright, 

With its ethereal vans — and speeding there, 
Like a star up the torrent of the night, 

Or a swift eagle in the morning glare 

Breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight, 

The pinnace, oared by those enchanted wings, 

Clove the fierce streams towards their upper springs. 



2IO THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

The water flashed like sunHght by the prow 
Of a noon-wandering meteor flung to Heaven ; 

The still air seemed as if the waves did flow 
In tempest down the mountains ; loosely driven 

The lady's radiant hair streamed to and fro : 
Beneath, the billows having vainly striven 

Indignant and impetuous, roared to feel 

The swift and steady motion of the keel. 

Or, when the weary moon was in the wane, 

Or in the noon of interlunar night, 
The lady-witch in visions could not chain 

Her spirit ; but sailed forth under the light 
Of shooting stars, and bade extend amain 

Its storm-outspeeding wings, the Hermaphrodite; 
She to the Austral waters took her way, 
Beyond the fabulous Thamondocana, 

Where, like a meadow which no scythe has shaven. 
Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake, 

With the Antarctic constellations paven, 

Canopus and his crew, lay the Austral lake — 

There she would build herself a windless haven 
Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make . 

The bastions of the storm, when through the sky 

The spirits of the tempest thundered by. 

A haven beneath whose translucent floor 
The tremulous stars sparkled unfathomably, 

And around which the solid vapors hoar. 
Based on the level waters, to the sky 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 21 1 

Lifted their dreadful crags, and like a shore 

Of wintry mountains, inaccessibly 
Hemmed in with rifts and precipices gray, 
And hanging crags, many a cove and bay. 

And whilst the outer lake beneath the lash 

Of the wind's scourge, foamed like a wounded 
thing ; 

And the incessant hail with stony clash 

Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing 

Of the roused cormorant in the lightning flash 
Looked like the wreck of some wind-wandering 

Fragment of inky thunder-smoke — this haven 

Was as a gem to copy Heaven engraven. 

On which that lady played her many pranks, 

Circling the image of a shooting star, 
Even as a tiger on Hydaspes' banks 

Outspeeds the antelopes which speediest are. 
In her light boat ; and many quips and cranks 

She played upon the water, till the car 
Of the late moon, like a sick matron wan. 
To journey from the misty east began. 

And then she called out of the hollow turrets 

Of those high clouds, white, golden and vermilion, 

The armies of her ministering spirits — 
In mighty legions, million after million, 

They came, each troop emblazoning its merits 
On meteor flags ; and many a proud pavilion 

Of the intertexture of the atmosphere 

They pitched upon the plain of the calm mere. 



212 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

They framed the imperial tent of their great Queen 

Of woven exhalations, underlaid 
With lambent lightning fire, as may be seen 

A dome of thin and open ivory inlaid 
With crimson silk — cressets from the serene 

Hung there, and on the water for her tread 
A tapestry of fleece-like mist was strewn. 
Dyed in the beams of the ascending moon. 

And on a throne o'erlaid with starlight, caught 
Upon those wandering isles of aery dew. 

Which highest shoals of mountain shipwreck not, 
She sate, and heard all that had happened new 

Between the earth and moon, since they had brought 
The last intelligence — and now she grew 

Pale as that moon, lost in the watery night — 

And now she wept, and now she laughed outright. 

These were tame pleasures ; she would often climb 
The steepest ladder of the crudded rack 

Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime, 
And like Arion on the dolphin's back 

Ride singing through the shoreless air ; — oft-time 
Following the serpent lightning's winding track, 

She ran upon the platforms of the wind. 

And laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind. 



And sometimes to those streams of upper air 
Which whirl the earth in its diurnal round, 

She would ascend, and win the spirits there 
To let her join their chorus. Mortals found 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 213 

That on those days the sky was calm and fair, 

And mystic snatches of harmonious sound 
Wandered upon the earth where'er she past, 
And happy thoughts of hope, too sweet to last. 

But her choice sport was, in the hours of sleep, 
To glide adown old Nilus, where he threads 

Egypt and Ethiopia, from the steep 
Of utmost Axume, until he spreads, 

Like a calm flock of silver-fleeced sheep. 
His waters on the plain : and crested heads 

Of cities and proud temples gleam amid, 

And many a vapor-belted pyramid. 

By Moeris and the Mareotid lakes. 

Strewn with faint blooms like bridal chamber floors, 
Where naked boys bridling tame water-snakes. 

Or charioteering ghastly alligators. 
Had left on the sweet waters mighty wakes 

Of those huge forms — within the brazen doors 
Of the great Labyrinth slept both boy and beast. 
Tired with the pomp of their Osirian feast. 

And where within the surface of the river 
The shadows of the massy temples lie. 

And never are erased — but tremble ever 

Like things which every cloud can doom to die, 

Through lotus-paven canals, and wheresoever 
The works of man pierced that serenest sky 

With tombs, and towers, and fanes, 'twas her delight 

To wander in the shadow of the night. 



2 14 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

With motion like the spirit of that wind 
Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light feet' 

Past through the peopled haunts of human kind, 
Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet, 

Through fane, and palace-court, and labyrinth mined 
With many a dark and subterranean street 

Under the Nile ; through chambers high and deep 

She past, observing mortals in their sleep. 

A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see 
Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep. 

Here lay two sister twins in infancy ; 

There, a lone youth who in his dreams did weep ; 

Within, two lovers linked innocently 

In their loose locks which over both did creep 

Like ivy from one stem ; — and there lay calm 

Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm. 

But other troubled forms of sleep she saw, 

Not to be mirrored in a holy song — 
Distortions foul of supernatural awe. 

And pale imaginings of visioned wTong ; 
And all the code of custom's lawless law 

Written upon the brows of old and young : 
" This," said the wizard maiden, " is the strife 
Which stirs the liquid surface of man's life." 

And little did the sight disturb her soul. — 
We, the weak mariners of that wide lake 

Where'er its shores extend or billows roll, 
Our course unpiloted and starless make 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 215 

O'er its wild surface to an unknown goal : — 

But she in the calm depths her way could take> 
Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide 
Beneath the weltering of the restless tide. 

And she saw princes couched under the glow 
Of sunlike gems ; and round each temple-court 

In dormitories ranged, row after row, 

She saw the priests asleep — all of one sort — 

For all were educated to be so. — 

The peasants in their huts, and in the port 

The sailors she saw cradled on the waves, 

And the dead lulled within their dreamless graves. 

And all the forms in which those spirits lay 
Were to her sight like the diaphanous 

Veils, in which those sweet ladies oft array 

Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us 

Only their scorn of all concealment : they 
Move in the light of their own beauty thus. 

But these and all now lay with sleep upon them, 

And little thought a Witch was looking on them. 

She, all those human figures breathing there, 

Beheld as living spirits — to her eyes 
The naked beauty of the soul lay bare, 

And often through a rude and worn disguise 
She saw the inner form most bright and fair — 

And then she had a charm of strange device. 
Which, murmured on mute lips with tender tone, 
Could make that spirit mingle with her own. 



2l6 l^HE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

Alas ! Aurora, what wouldst thou have given 
For such a charm when Tithon became gray? 

Or how much, Venus, of thy silver Heaven 
Wouldst thou have yielded, ere Proserpina 

Had half (oh! why not all?) the debt forgiven 
Which dear Adonis had been doomed to pay, 

To any witch who would have taught you it ? 

The Heliad doth not know its value yet. 

'Tis said in after times her spirit free 

Knew what love was, and felt itself alone — 

But holy Dian could not chaster be 
Before she stooped to kiss Endymion, 

Than now this lady — like a sexless bee 
Tasting all blossoms, and confined to none, 

Among those mortal forms, the wizard-maiden 

Past with an eye serene and heart unladen. 

To those she saw most beautiful, she gave 
Strange panacea in a crystal bowl : — 

They drank in their deep sleep of that sweet wave, 
And lived thenceforward as if some control, 

Mightier than life, were in them ; and the grave 
Of such, when death oppressed the weary soul, 

Was as a green and overarching bower 

Lit by the gems of many a starry flower. 

For on the night when they were buried, she 
Restored the embalmer's ruining, and shook 

The light out of the funeral lamps, to be 
A mimic day within that deathy nook ; 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 217 

And she unwound the woven imagery 

Of second childhood's swaddHng bands, and took 
The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche, 
And threw it with contempt into a ditch. 

And there the body lay, age after age, 

Mute, breathing, beating, warm and undecaying, 

Like one asleep in a green hermitage, 
With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing, 

And living in its dreams beyond the rage 

Of death or life ; while they were still arraying 

In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind 

And fleeting generations of mankind. 

And she would write strange dreams upon the brain 
Of those who were less beautiful, and make 

All harsh and crooked purposes more vain 
Than in the desert is the serpent's wake 

Which the sand covers, — all his evil gain 

The miser in such dreams would rise and shake 

Into a beggar's lap ; — the lying scribe 

Would his own lies betray without a bribe. 

The priests would write an explanation full, 

Translating hieroglyphics into Greek, 
How the god Apis really was a bull, 

And nothing more ; and bid the herald stick 
The same against the temple doors, and pull 

The old cant down ; they licensed all to speak 
Whate'er they thought of hawks, and cats, and geese 
By pastoral letters to each diocese. 



2l8 THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 

The king would dress an ape up in his crown 
And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat, 

And on the right hand of the sunlike throne 
Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat 

The chatterings of the monkey. — Every one 
Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet 

Of their great Emperor, when the morning came, 

And kissed — alas, how many kiss the same ! 

The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, and 
Walked out of quarters in somnambulism ; 

Round the red anvils you might see them stand 
Like Cyclopses in Vulcan's sooty abysm, 

Beating their swords to ploughshares ; — in a band 
The gaolers sent those of the liberal schism 

Free through the streets of Memphis, much, I wis 

To the annoyance of king Amasis. 

And timid lovers who had been so coy, 

They hardly knew whether they loved or not. 

Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy, 
To the fulfilment of their inmost thought ; 

And when next day the maiden and the boy 
Met one another, both, like sinners caught, 

Blushed at the thing which each believed was done 

Only in fancy — till the tenth moon shone ; 

And then the Witch would let them take no ill : 
Of many thousand schemes which lovers find, 

The Witch found one, — and so they took their fill 
Of happiness in marriage warm and kind. 



THE WITCH OF ATLAS. 219 

Friends who, by practice of some envious skill, 

Were torn apart, a wide wound, mind from mind ! 
She did unite again with visions clear 
Of deep affection and of truth sincere. 

These were the pranks she played among the cities 
Of mortal men, and what she did to sprites 

And Gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties 
To do her will, and show their subtle slights, 

I will declare another time ; for it is 

A tale more fit for the weird winter nights. 

Than for these garish summer days, when we 

Scarcely believe much more than we can see. 

1820. 



€\)t ©ucstion* 



THE QUESTION. 

I DREAMED that, as I wandered by the way, 
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring, 

And gentle odors led my steps astray, 
Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring 

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay 
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling 

Its green arms round the bosom of the stream. 

But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream. 

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets, 
Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth, 

The constellated flower that never sets ; 

Faint oxlips ; tender bluebells, at whose birth 

The sod scarce heaved ; and that tall flower that 
wets — 
Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth — 

Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears, 

When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears. 

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, 
Green cow-bind and the moonlight-colored May, 



THE QUESTION. 221 

And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine 
Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day ; 

And wild roses, and ivy serpentine, 

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray ; 

And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, 

Fairer than any wakened eyes behold. 

And nearer to the river's trembling edge 

There grew broad flag-flowers, purple prankt with 
white. 

And starry river buds among the sedge, 
And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, 

Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge 

With moonlight beams of their own watery light ; 

And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green 

As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen. 

Methought that of these visionary flowers 
I made a nosegay, bound in such a way 

That the same hues, which in their natural bowers 
Were mingled or opposed, the like array 

Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours 
Within my hand, — and then, elate and gay, 

I hastened to the spot whence I had come. 

That I might there present it ! — Oh ! to whom ? 

1820. 



22 2 TO EMILIA VI VI AN L 



TO EMILIA VIVIANI. 

Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me 

Sweet basil and mignonette? 
Embleming love and health, which never yet 
In the same wreath might be. 

Alas, and they are wet ! 
Is it with thy kisses or thy tears? 
For never rain or dew 
Such fragrance drew 
From plant or flower — the very doubt endears 

My sadness ever new, 
The sighs I breathe, the tears I shed for thee. 

1821, 



1EpijJS2cl)ttiton. 



VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE NOBLE AND UNFORTUNATE 
LADY EMILIA VIVIANI, NOW IMPRISONED IN THE 
CONVENT OF ST. ANNE, PISA. 

L'anima amante si slancia fuori del create, e si crea nell' infinito un 
Mondo tutto per essa, diverse assai da questo oscuro e pauroso baratro. 
— Her 0W71 words. 

My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few 
Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning, 
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain; 
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring 
Thee to base company (as chance may do), 
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain, 
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again. 
My last delight ! tell them that they are dull, 
And bid them own that thou art beautiful. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 

[by SHELLEY.] 

The writer of the following lines died at Florence, as he was 
preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades, 
which he had bought, and where he had fitted up the ruins 
of an old building, and where it was his hope to have realized 
a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better 
world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly practicable 
in this. His life was singular ; less on account of the romantic 

223 



2 24 EPIPSYCHIDION. 

vicissitudes which diversified it, than the ideal tinge which it 
received from his own character and feelings. The present 
Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible 
to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of 
the circumstances to which it relates ; and to a certain other 
class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of 
a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats. 
Not but that, gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, eke rhnasse cosa 
sot to veste di figura, o ,di colore rettorico: e domandato non 
sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che aves- 
sero verace intendimento . 

The present poem appears to have been intended by the 
writer as the dedication to some longer one. The stanza on 
the opposite page is almost a literal translation from Dante's 
famous Canzone 

Vol, ch' intendendo, il terzo del movete, etc. 

The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his 
own composition will raise a smile at the expense of my 
unfortunate friend : be it a smile not of contempt, but pity. 



EPIPSYCHJDION. 

Sweet Spirit ! Sister of that orphan one, 
Whose empire is the name thou weepest on, 
In my heart's temple I suspend to thee 
These votive wreaths of withered memory. 

Poor captive bird ! who, from thy narrow cage, 
Pourest such music, that it might assuage 
The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee, 
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody ; 
This song shall be thy rose : its petals pale 
Are dead, indeed, my adored Nightingale ! 



EPIPSYCHIDION. 225 

But soft and fragrant is the faded blossom, 
And it has no thorn left to wound thy bosom. 

High, spirit-winged Heart ! who dost for ever 
Beat thine unfeeling bars with vain endeavor, 
Till those bright plumes of thought, in which arrayed 
It over-soared this low and worldly shade, 
Lie shattered ; and thy panting, wounded breast 
Stains with dear blood its unmaternal nest ! 
I weep vain tears : blood would less bitter be, 
Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee. 

Seraph of Heaven ! too gentle to be human. 
Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman 
All that is insupportable in thee 
Of light, and love, and immortality ! 
Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse ! 
Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe ! 
Thou Moon beyond the clouds ! Thou living Form 
Among the Dead ! Thou Star above the Storm ! 
Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror ! 
Thou Harmony of Nature^s art ! Thou Mirror 
In whom, as in the splendor of the Sun, 
All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on ! 
Aye, even the dim words which obscure thee now 
Flash, lightning-like, with unaccustomed glow ; 
I pray thee that thou blot from this sad song 
All of its much mortality and wrong, 
With those clear drops, which start like sacred dew 
From the twin lights thy sweet soul darkens through. 
Weeping, till sorrow becomes ecstasy : 
Then smile on it, so that it may not die. 



2 26 EPIPS Y CHI DION. 

I never thought before my death to see 
Youth's vision thus made perfect. Emily, 
I love thee ; though the world by no thin name 
Will hide that love from its unvalued shame. 
Would we two had been twins of the same mother! 
Or, that the name my heart lent to another 
Could be a sister's bond for her and thee, 
Blending two beams of one eternity ! 
Yet were one lawful and the other true. 
These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due, 
How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me ! 
I am not thine : I am a part of thee. 

Sw^eet Lamp ! my moth-like Muse has burnt its 

wings ; 
Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings. 
Young Love should teach Time, in his own gray 

style. 
All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile, 
A lovely soul formed to be blest and bless ? 
A well of sealed and secret happiness. 
Whose waters like blithe light and music are, 
Vanquishing dissonance and gloom ? A Star 
Which moves not in the moving Heavens, alone ? 
A smile amid dark frowns ? a gentle tone 
Amid rude voices ? a beloved light ? 
A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight ? 
A Lute, which those whom love has taught to play 
Make music on, to soothe the roughest day 
And lull fond grief asleep ? a buried treasure ? 
A cradle of young thoughts of wingless pleasure ? 
A violet-shrouded grave of Woe ? — I measure 



EPIPS Y CHID I ON. 227 

The AvoiM of fancies, seeking one like thee, 
And find — alas ! mine own infirmity. 

She met me, Stranger, upon lifers rough way. 
And lured me towards sweet Death ; as Night by Day, 
Winter by Spring, or Sorrow by swift Hope, 
Led into light, life, peace. An antelope. 
In the suspended impulse of its lightness. 
Were less ethereally light : the brightness 
Of her divinest presence trembles through 
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew 
Embodied in the windless Heaven of June 
Amid the splendor-winged stars, the Moon 
Burns, inextinguishably beautiful : 
And from her lips, as from a hyacinth full 
Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops, 
Killing the sense with passion ; sweet as st^ps 
Of planetary music heard in trance- 
In her mild lights the starry spirits dance. 
The sun-beams of those wells which ever leap 
Under the lightnings of the soul — too deep 
For the brief fathom-line of thought or sense. 
The glory of her being, issuing thence. 
Stains the dead, blank, cold air with a warm shade 
Of unentangled intermixture, made 
By Love, of light and motion : one intense 
Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence, 
Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing 
Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing 
With the unintermitted blood, which there 
Quivers, (as in a fleece of snow-like air 
The crimson pulse of living morning quiver,) 



2 28 EPIPSYCHWION. 

Continuously prolonged, and ending never, 
Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled 
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world ; 
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness. 

Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress 
And her loose hair ; and where some heavy tress 
The air of her own speed has disentwined. 
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind ; 
And in the soul a wild odor is felt, 
Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt 

Into the bosom of a frozen bud. 

See where she stands ! a mortal shape indued 
With love and life and light and deity. 
And motion which may change but cannot die ; 
An image of some bright Eternity ; 
A shadow^of some golden dream ; a Splendor 
Leaving the third sphere pilotless ; a tender 
Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love 
Under whose motions life's dull billows move ; 
A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning ; 
A Vision like incarnate April, warning. 
With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy 
Into his summer grave. 

Ah, woe is me! 
What have I dared ? where am I lifted ? how 
Shall I descend, and perish not ? I know 
That Love makes all things equal : I have heard 
By mine own heart this joyous truth averred : 
The spirit of the worm beneath the sod 
In love and worship, blends itself with God. 



EPIPS YC HI DION. 229 

Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate 
Whose course has been so starless! O too late 
Beloved! O too soon adored, by me! 
For in the fields of immortality 
My spirit should at first have worshipped thine, 
A divine presence in a place divine ; 
Or should have moved beside it on this earth, 
A shadow of that substance, from its birth ; 
But not as now : — I love thee ; yes, I feel 
That on the fountain of my heart a seal 
Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright 
For thee, since in those tears thou hast delight. 
We — are we not formed, as notes of music are, 
For one another, though dissimilar ; 
Such difference without discord, as can make 
Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake 
As trembling leaves in a continuous air? 

Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare 
Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt. 
I never was attached to that great sect, 
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select 
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend. 
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend 
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code 
Of modern morals, and the beaten road 
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps 

tread, 
Who travel to their home among the dead 
By the broad highway of the world, and so 
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, 
The dreariest and the longest journey go. 



230 EPIPS YCNIDIOA \ 

True Love in this differs from gold and clay 
That to divide is not to take away. 
Love is like understanding that grows bright 
Gazing on many truths ; 'tis like thy light, 
Imagination ! which from earth and sky, 
And from the depths of human phantasy, 
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills 
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills 
Error, the worm, wdth many a sun-like arrow 
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow 
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, 
The life that wears, the spirit that creates 
One object, and one form, and builds thereby 
A sepulchre for its eternity. 

Mind from its object differs most in this : 
Evil from good ; misery from happiness ; 
The baser from the nobler ; the impure 
And frail, from what is clear and must endure. 
If you divide suffering and dross, you may 
Diminish till it is consumed away ; 
If you divide pleasure and love and thought, 
Each part exceeds the whole ; and we know not 
How much, while any yet remains unshared. 
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared : 
This truth is that deep well, w^hence sages draw 
The unenvied light of hope ; the eternal law 
By which those live, to whom this world of life 
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife 
Tills for the promise of a later birth 
The wilderness of this Elysian earth. 



EPIPS Y CHI DION. 231 

There was a Being whom my spirit oft 
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft. 
In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn, 
Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn, 
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves 
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves 
Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor 
Paved her light steps ; — on an imagined shore, 
Under the gray beak of some promontory 
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory. 
That I beheld her not. In solitudes 
Her voice came to me through the whispering woods, 
And from the fountains, and the odors deep 
Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep 
Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there. 
Breathed but of her to the enamoured air ; 
And from the breezes whether low or loud, 
And from the rain of every passing cloud. 
And from the singing of the summer-birds. 
And from all sounds, all silence. In the words 
Of antique verse and high romance, — in form, 
Sound, color — in whatever checks that Storm 
Which with the shattered present chokes the past ; 
And in that best philosophy, whose taste 
Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom 
As glorious as a fiery martyrdom ; 
Her Spirit was the harmony of truth. — 

Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth 
I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire, 
And towards the loadstar of my one desire, 
I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight 



232 EPIPS YCHIDION. 

Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light, 

When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere 

A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre, 

As if it were a lamp of earthly flame. — 

But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame, 

Past, like a God throned on a winged planet, 

Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it, 

Into the dreary cone of our life's shade ; 

And as a man with mighty loss dismayed, 

I would have followed, though the grave between 

Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen : 

When a voice said : — " O Thou of hearts the weakest, 

The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest." 

Then I — " where ? " the world's echo answered 

" where ! " 
And in that silence, and in my despair, 
I questioned every tongueless wind that flew 
Over my tower of mourning, if it knew 
Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul ; 
And murmured names and spells which have control 
Over the sightless tyrants of our fate ; 
But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate 
The night which closed on her ; nor uncreate 
That world within this Chaos, mine and me, 
Of which she was the veiled Divinity, 
The world I say of thoughts that worshipped her : 
And therefore I went forth, with hope and fear 
And every gentle passion sick to death, 
Feeding my course with expectation's breath, 
Into the wintry forest of our life ; 
And straggling through its error with vain strife, 
And stumbling in my weakness and my haste, . 



EPIPS Y CHID I ON. 233 

And half bewildered by new forms, I past 
Seeking among those untaught foresters 
If I could find one form resembling hers, 
In which she might have masked herself from me. 
There, — One, whose voice was venomed melody- 
Sate by a well, under blue night-shade bowers ; 
The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers. 
Her touch was as electric poison, — flame 
Out of her looks into my vitals came, 
And from her living cheeks and bosom flew 
A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew 
Into the core of my green heart, and lay 
Upon its leaves ; until, as hair grown gray 
O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime 
With ruins of unseasonable time. 

In many mortal forms I rashly sought 
The shadow of that idol of my thought. 
And some were fair — but beauty dies away : 
Others were wise — but honeyed words betray : 
And One was true — oh ! why not true to me ? 
Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee, 
I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay, 
Wounded and weak and panting ; the cold day 
Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain. 
When, like a noon-day dawn, there shone again 
Deliverance. One stood on my path who seemed 
As like the glorious shape which I had dreamed, 
As is the Moon, whose changes ever run 
Into themselves, to the eternal Sun ; 
The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven's bright 
isles, 



234 EPIPS Y CHI DION. 

Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles, 
That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame 
Which ever is transformed, yet still the same, 
And warms not but illumines. Young and fair 
As the descended Spirit of that sphere. 
She hid me, as the Moon may hide the night 
From its own darkness, until all was bright 
Between the Heaven and Earth of my calm mind, 
And, as a cloud charioted by the wind, 
She led me to a cave in that wild place, 
And sate beside me, with her downward face 
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon 
Waxing and waning o'er Endymion. 
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb, 
And all my being became bright or dim 
As the Moon's image in a summer sea, 
According as she smiled or frowned on me ; 
And there I lay, w-ithin a chaste cold bed : 
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead : — 
For at her silver voice came Death and Life, 
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife, 
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother. 
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother, 
And through the cavern without wings they flew, 
And cried "^ Away, he is not of our crew." 
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep. 

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep. 
Blotting that Moon, whose pale and weaning lips 
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse ; — 
And how my soul was as a lampless sea. 
And who was then its Tempest ; and when She. 



EPIPS Y cm DION. 235 

The Planet of that hour, was quenched, wliat frost 

Crept o'er those waters, till from coast to coast 

The moving billows of my being fell 

Into a death of ice, immovable ; — 

And then — what earthquakes made it gape and 

split, 
The white Moon smiling all the while on it. 
These words conceal : — If not, each word would be 
The key of stanchless tears. Weep not for me ! 

At length, into the obscure Forest came 
The Vision I had sought through grief and shame. 
Athwart that wintry wilderness of thorns 
Flashed from her motion splendor like the Morn's, 
And from her presence life was radiated 
Through the gray earth and branches bare and dead ; 
So that her way was paved, and roofed above 
With iiowers as soft as thoughts of budding love ; 
And music from her respiration spread 
Like light, — all other sounds were penetrated 
By the small, still, sweet spirit of that sound. 
So that the savage winds hung mute around ; 
And odors warm and fresh fell from her hair 
Dissolving the dull cold in the frore air : 
Soft as an Incarnation of the Sun, 
When light is changed to love, this glorious One 
Floated into the cavern where I lay, 
And called my Spirit, and the dreaming clay 
Was lifted by the thing that dreamed below 
As smoke by fire, and in her beauty's glow 
I stood, and felt the dawn of my long night 
Was penetrating me with living light : 



236 EPIPSYCHIDION. 

I knew it was the Vision veiled from me 
So many years — that it was Emily, 

Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth, 
This world of love, this me ; and into birth 
Awaken all its fruits and flowers, and dart 
Magnetic might into its central heart ; 
And lift its billows and its mists, and guide 
By everlasting laws, each wind and tide 
To its fit cloud, and its appointed cave ; 
And lull its storms, each in the craggy grave 
Which was its cradle, luring to faint bowers 
The armies of the rain-bow-winged showers ; 
And, as those married lights, which from the towers 
Of Heaven look forth and fold the wandering globe 
In liquid sleep and splendor, as a robe ; 
And all their many-mingled influence blend, 
If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end ; — 
So ye, bright regents, with alternate sway 
Govern my sphere of being, night and day ! 
Thou, not disdaining even a borrowed might ; 
Thou, not eclipsing a remoter light ; 
And, through the shadow of the seasons three, 
From Spring to Autumn's sere maturity, 
Light it into the Winter of the tomb. 
Where it may ripen to a brighter bloom. 
Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce, 
Who drew the heart of this frail Universe 
Towards thine own ; till, wreckt in that convulsion, 
Alternating attraction and repulsion. 
Thine went astray and that was rent in twain ; 
Oh, float into our azure heaven again ! 



EPIPS Y CHID I ON. 237 

Be there love's folding-star at thy return ; 
The living Sun will feed thee from its urn 
Of golden fire ; the Moon will veil her horn 
In thy last smiles ; adoring Even and Morn 
Will worship thee with incense of calm breath 
And lights and shadows ; as the star of Death 
And Birth is worshipped by those sisters wild 
Called Hope and Fear — upon the heart are piled 
Their offerings, — of this sacrifice divine 
A World shall be the altar. 

Lady mine, 
Scorn not these flowers of thought, the fading birth 
Which from its heart of hearts that plant puts forth 
Whose fruit, made perfect by thy sunny eyes, 
Will be as of the trees of Paradise. 

The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me. 
To whatsoe'er of dull mortality 
Is mine, remain a vestal sister still ; 
To the intense, the deep, the imperishable. 
Not mine but me, henceforth be thou united 
Even as a bride, delighting and delighted. 
The hour is come : — the destined Star has risen 
Which shall descend upon a vacant prison. 
The walls are high, the gates are strong, thick set 
The sentinels — but true love never yet 
Was thus constrained : it overleaps all fence : 
Like lightning, with invisible violence 
Piercing its continents ; like Heaven's free breath, 
Which he who grasps can hold not ; liker Death, 
Who rides upon a thought, and makes his way 
Through temple, tower, and palace, and the array 



238 EPIPS Y CHI DION. 

Of arms ; more strength has Love than he or they ; 
For it can burst his charnel, and make free 
The limbs in chains, the heart in agony, 
The soul in dust and chaos. 

Emily, 
A ship is floating in the harbor now, 
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow ; 
There is a path on the sea's azure floor, 
No keel has ever ploughed that path before ; 
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles ; 
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles ; 
The merry mariners are bold and free : 
Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? 
Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest 
Is a far Eden of the purple East ; 
And we between her wings will sit, while Night 
And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight, 
Our ministers, along the boundless Sea, 
Treading each other's heels, unheededly. 
It is an isle under Ionian skies, 
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise, 
And, for the harbors are not safe and good, 
This land would have remained a solitude 
But for some pastoral people native there. 
Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air 
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold, 
Simple and spirited ; innocent and bold. 
The blue ^gean girds this chosen home, 
With ever-changing sound and light and foam, 
Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar ; 
And all the winds wandering along the shore 
Undulate with the undulating tide : 



EPIPSYCIIIDION. 239 

There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide ; 

And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond. 

As clear as elemental diamond, 

Or serene morning air ; and far beyond, 

The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer 

(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year,) 

Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls 

Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls 

Illumining, with sound that never fails 

Accompany the noon-day nightingales ; 

And all the place is peopled with sweet airs ; 

The light clear element which the isle wears 

Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers, 

Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers, 

And falls upon the eye-lids like faint sleep ; 

And from the moss violets and jonquils peep. 

And dart their arrowy odor through the brain 

Till you might faint with that delicious pain. 

And every motion, odor, beam, and tone, 

With that deep music is in unison : 

Which is a soul within the soul — they seem 

Like echoes of an antenatal dream. — 

It is an isle Hwixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, 

Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity ; 

Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer, 

Washed by the soft blue Oceans of young air 

It is a favored place. Famine or Blight, 

Pestilence, War and Earthquake, never light 

Upon its mountain-peaks ; blind vultures, they 

Sail onward far upon their fatal way : 

The winged storms, chaunting their thunder-psalm 

To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm 



240 EPIPSYCHIDION. 

Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew, 

From which its fields and woods ever renew 

Their green and golden immortality. 

And from the sea there rise, and from the sky 

There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright, 

Veil after veil, each hiding some delight, 

Which Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside, 

Till the isle's beauty, like a naked bride 

Glowing at once with love and loveliness. 

Blushes and trembles at its own excess : 

Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less 

Burns in the heart of this delicious isle. 

An atom of th' Eternal, whose own smile 

Unfolds itself, and may be felt, not seen 

O'er the gray rocks, blue waves, and forests green, 

Filling their bare and void interstices. — 

But the chief marvel of the wilderness 

Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how 

None of the rustic island-people know : 

'Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height 

It overtops the woods ; but, for delight. 

Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime 

Had been invented, in the world's young prime, 

Reared it, a wonder of that simple time. 

An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house 

Made sacred to his sister and his spouse. 

It scarce seems now a wreck of human art, 

But, as it were Titanic ; in the heart 

Of Earth having assumed its form, then grown 

Out of the mountains, from the living stone, 

Lifting itself in caverns light and high : 

For all the antique and learned imagery 



EPIPSYCHIDION. 241 

Has been erased, and in the place of it 

The ivy and the wild-vine interknit 

The volumes of their many-twining stems ; 

Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems 

The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky 

Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery 

With Moon-light patches, or star atoms keen, 

Or fragments of the day's intense serene ; — 

Working mosaic on their Parian floors. 

And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers 

And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem 

To sleep in one another's arms, and dream 

Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that 

we 
Read in their smiles, and call reality. 

This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed 
Thee to be lady of the solitude. — 
And I have fitted up some chambers there 
Looking towards the golden Eastern air, 
And level with the living winds, which flow 
Like waves above the living waves below. — 
I have sent books and music there, and all 
Those instruments with which high spirits call 
The future from its cradle, and the past 
Out of its grave, and make the present last 
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, 
Folded within their own eternity. 
Our simple life wants little, and true taste 
Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste 
The scene it would adorn, and therefore still, 



242 EPIPS YCHIDION. 

The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet 
Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit 
Round the evening tower, and the young stars 

glance 
Between the quick bats in their twilight dance ; 
The spotted deer bask in the fresh moon-light 
Before our gate, and the slow, silent night 
Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep. 
Be this our home in life, and when years heap 
Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay, 
Let us become the over-hanging day. 
The living soul of this Elysian isle, 
Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile 
We two will rise, and sit, and walk together, 
Under the roof of blue Ionian weather. 
And wander in the meadows, or ascend 
The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend 
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour ; 
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore, 
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea 
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy, — 
Possessing and possest by all that is 
Within that calm circumference of bliss, 
And by each other, till to love and live 
Be one : — or, at the noontide hour, arrive 
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep 
The moonlight of the expired night asleep, 
Through which the awakened day can never peep ; 
A veil for our seclusion, close as Night's, 
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights ; 
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain 
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again. 



EPIPSYCHIDION. 243 

And we will talk, until thought's melody 

Become too sweet for utterance, and it die 

In words, to live again in looks, which dart 

With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart, 

Harmonizing silence without a sound. 

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, 

And our veins beat together ; and our lips 

With other eloquence than words, eclipse 

The soul that burns between them, and the wells 

Which boil under our being's inmost cells. 

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be 

Confused in passion's golden purity. 

As mountain-springs under the morning Sun. 

We. shall become the same, we shall be one 

Spirit within two frames, oh ! wherefore two? 

One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew 

Till like two meteors of expanding flame. 

Those spheres instinct with it become the same, 

Touch, mingle, are transfigured ; ever still 

Burning, yet ever inconsumable : 

In one another's substance finding food. 

Like flames too pure and light and unimbued 

To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, 

Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away : 

One hope within two wills, one will beneath 

Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, 

One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality. 

And one annihilation. Woe is me ! 

The winged words on which my soul would pierce 

Into the height of love's rare Universe, 

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. — 

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire ! 



244 FRAGMENT. 

Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet, 
And say : — " We are the masters of thy slave ; 
What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?" 
Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, 
All singing loud : " Love's very pain is sweet, 
But its reward is in the world divine 
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave." 
So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste 
Over the hearts of men, until ye meet 
Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest, 
And bid them love each other and be blest : 
And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, 
And come and be my guest, — for I am Love's. 

1820. 



FRAGMENT. 

Is it that in some brighter sphere 
We part from friends we meet with here? 
Or do we see the Future pass 
Over the Present's dusky glass ? 
Or what is that that makes us seem 
To patch up fragments of a dream, 
Part of which comes true, and part 
Beats and trembles in the heart? 

1819. 



^oemg to ILiiertg, ©reece, anD Etalg. 



ODE TO NAPLES. 



EpODE I. a. 



I STOOD within the city disinterred ; 

And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls 
Of spirits passing through the streets ; and heard 

The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals 
Thrill through those roofless halls ; 
The oracular thunder penetrating shook 

The listening soul in my suspended blood ; 
I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke — 

I felt, but heard not : — through white columns 
glowed 
The isle-sustaining Ocean-flood, 
A plane of light between two Heavens of azure : 

Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre 
Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure 
Were to spare Death, had never made erasure ; 

But every living lineament was clear 

As in the sculptor's thought ; and there 
The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine, 

Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow, 

Seemed only not to move and grow 

245 



246 TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 

Because the crystal silence of the air 

Weighed on their life ; even as the Power divine 
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine. 



Epode II. a. 

Then gentle winds arose 
With many a mingled close 
Of wild y^olian sound and mountain-odor keen ; 
And where the Baian ocean 
Welters with airlike motion, 
Within, above, around its bowers of starry green, 
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves 
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere 
Floats o'er the Elysian realm, 
It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves 

Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air 
No storm can overwhelm ; 
I sailed, where ever flows 
Under the calm Serene 
A spirit of deep emotion 
From the unknown graves 
Of the dead kings of Melody. 
Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm 
The horizontal aether ; heaven stript bare 
Its depths over Elysium, where the prow 
Made the invisible water white as snow ; , 
From that Typhaean mount, Inarime 

There streamed a sunlight vapor, like the 
standard 

Of some cctherial host ; 
Whilst from all the coast, 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 247 

Louder and louder, gathering round, there 
wandered 
Over the oracular woods and divine sea 
Prophesyings which grew articulate — 
They seize me — I must speak them — be they fate ! 

Strophe a. i. 

Naples ! thou Heart of men which ever pantest 

Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven ! 
Elysian city which to calm inchantest 

The mutinous air and sea : they round thee, even 

As sleep round Love, are driven ! 
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise 

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained ! 
Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice, 

Which armed Victory offers up unstained 

To Love, the flower-enchained ! 
Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be, 
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free. 

If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail, 
Hail, hail, all hail ! 

Strophe /?. 2. 

. Thou youngest giant birth 
Which from the groaning earth 
Leap'st, clothed in armor of impenetrable scale ! 
Last of the Intercessors ! 
Who 'gainst the Crowned Transgressors 
Pleadest before God's love ! Arrayed in Wisdom's 
mail, 
Wave thy lightning lance in mirth 



248 TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 

Nor let thy high heart fail, 
Though from their hundred gates the leagued 
Oppressors, 
With hurried legions move ! 
Hail, hail, all hail ! 

Antistrophe a. I. 

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme 

Freedom and thee ? thy shield is as a mirror 
To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam 

To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer ; 
A new Actaeon's error 
Shall theirs have been — devoured by their own 
hounds ! 

Be thou like the imperial Basilisk 
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds ! 

Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk 

Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk : 
Fear not, but gaze — for freemen mightier grow, 
And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe ; 

If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail, 

Thou shalt be great. — All hail ! 

Antistrophe /?. 2. 

From Freedom's form divine, 

From Nature's inmost shrine. 
Strip every impious gaud, rend Error veil by veil : 

O'er Ruin desolate, 

O'er Falsehood's fallen state. 
Sit thou sublime, unawed ; be the Destroyer pale ! 

And equal laws be thine. 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 249 

And winged words let sail, 
Freighted with truth even from the throne of God : 
That wealth, surviving fate, 
Be thine. — All hail ! 

Antistrophe a. y. 

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling, paean 

From land to land re-echoed solemnly, 
Till silence became music ? From the ^aean 
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy 
Starts to hear thine ! The Sea 
Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs 

In light and music ; widowed Genoa wan 
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs. 
Murmuring, where is Doria ? fair Milan, 
Within whose veins long ran 
The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel 
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal 
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail) 
Art Thou of all these hopes. — O hail ! 

Antistrophe /?. y. 

Florence ! beneath the sun, 

Of cities fairest one. 
Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation : 

From eyes of quenchless hope 

Rome tears the priestly cope, 
As ruling once by power, so now by admiration, 

As athlete stript to run 

From a remoter station 
For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore : — 



250 TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 

As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail, 
So now may Fraud and Wrong ! O hail ! 

Epode I. j8. 

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms 

Arrayed against the ever-living Gods? 
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms 
Bursting their inaccessible abodes 

Of crags and thunder clouds ? 
See ye the banners blazoned to the day, 

Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride? 
Dissonant threats kill Silence far away, 

The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide 
With iron light is dyed, 
The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions 

Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating ; 
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions 
And lawless slaveries, — down the aerial regions 
Of the white Alps, desolating. 
Famished wolves that bide no waiting, 
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory, 
Trampling our columned cities into dust. 
Their dull and savage lust 
On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating — 
They come ! The fields they tread look black and 

hoary 
With fire — from their red feet the streams run gory ! 

Epode II. /?. 

Great Spirit, deepest Love ! 
Which rulest and dost move 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 251 

All things which live and are, within the Italian shore ; 
Who spreadest heaven around it, 
Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it ; 
Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor, 
Spirit of beauty ! at whose soft command 

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison 
From the Earth's bosom chill ; 
O bid those beams be each a blinding brand 

Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison! 
Bid the Earth's plenty kill ! 
Bid thy bright Heaven above. 
Whilst light and darkness bound it. 
Be their tomb who planned 
To make it ours and thine ! 
Or, with thine harmonizing ardors fill 
And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon 
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire — 
Be man's high hope and unextinct desire. 
The instrument to work thy will divine! 

Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from 
leopards, 
And frowns and fears from Thee, 
Would not more swiftly flee 
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. — 
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine 
Thou yieldest or withholdest. Oh let be 
This city of thy worship ever free ! 

August 25, 1820. 



252 TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 



GREECE TO SLAVERY. 

Let there be light ! said Liberty, 
And like sunrise from the sea, 
Athens arose ! — Around her born, 
Shone like mountains in the morn 
Glorious states ; — and are they now 
Ashes, wrecks, oblivion ? Go, 
Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed 
Persia, as the sand does foam. 
Deluge upon deluge followed, 
Discord, Macedon, and Rome : 
And lastly thou ! Temples and towers, 
Citadels and marts, and they 
Who live and die there, have been ours. 
And may be thine, and must decay ; 
But Greece and her foundations are 
Built below the tide of war, 
Based on the crystalline sea 
Of thought and its eternity ; 
Her citizens, imperial spirits, 
Rule the present from the past, 
On all this world of men inherits 

Their seal is set, 

Hellas. 



CHORUS. 

In the great morning of the world, 
The spirit of God with might unfurPd 
The flag of Freedom over Chaos, 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 253 

And all its banded anarchs fled, 
Like vultures frightened from Imaus, 

Before an earthquake's tread. — 
So from Time's tempestuous dawn 
Freedom's splendor burst and shone : — 
Thermopylae and Marathon 
Caught, like mountains beacon-lighted. 

The springing Fire. — The winged glory 
On Philippi half alighted. 

Like an eagle on a promontory. 
Its unv/earied wings could fan 
The quenchless ashes of Milan. 
From age to age, from man to man, 

It lived ; and lit from land to land, 

Florence, Albion, Switzerland. 
Then night fell ; and, as from night, 
Re-assuming fiery flight. 
From the West swift Freedom came. 

Against the course of Heaven and doom, 
A second sun arrayed in flame. 

To burn, to kindle, to illume. 
From far Atlantis its young beams 
Chased the shadows and the dreams. 
France, with all her sanguine steams, 

Hid, but quench'd it not ; again 

Through clouds its shafts of glory rain 

From utmost Germany to Spain. 
As an eagle fed with morning 
Scorns the embattled tempest's warning, 
When she seeks her aerie hanging 

In the mountain-cedar's hair. 
And her brood expect the clanging 



2 54 TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 



Sick with famine : — Freedom, so 
To what of Greece remaineth now 
Returns ; her hoary ruins glow 
Like orient mountains lost in day ; 

Beneath the safety of her wings 
Her renovated nurslings prey, 

And in the naked lightnings 
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes. 
Let Freedom leave — where'er she flies, 
A Desert, or a Paradise : 

Let the beautiful and the brave 

Share her glory, or a grave. 

Hellas. 



CHORUS. 

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever 

From creation to decay. 
Like the bubbles on a river 

Sparkling, bursting, borne away. 
But they are still immortal 
Who, through birth's orient portal 
And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro, 
Clothe their unceasing flight 
Jn the brief dust and light 
Gathered around their chariots as they go ; 
New shapes they still may weave, 
New gods, new laws receive, 
Bright or dim are they as the robes they last 
On Death's bare ribs had cast. 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 255 

A power from the unknown God, 

A Promethean conqueror came ; 
Like a trmmphal path he trod 
The thorns of death and shame. 
A mortal shape to him 
Was Hke the vapor dim 
Which the orient planet animates with light; 
Hell, Sin, and Slavery came. 
Like blood-hounds mild and tame, 
Nor preyed, until their Lord had taken flight ; 
The moon of Mahomet 
Arose, and it shall set : 
While blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon 
The cross leads generations on. 

Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep 

From one whose dreams are Paradise 
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep. 

And day peers forth with her blank eyes ; 

So fleet, so faint, so fair. 

The Powers of earth and air 
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem : 

Apollo, Pan, and Love, 

And even Olympian Jove 
Grew weak, for kiUing Truth had glared on them ; 

Our hills and seas and streams 

Dispeopled of their dreams, 
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears. 

Wailed for the golden years. 

Hellas. 



256 TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 



CHORUS. 

The world's great age begins anew, 

The golden years return, 
The earth doth like a snake renew 

Her winter weeds outworn : 
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, 
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. 

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains 

From waves serener far ; 
A new Peneus rolls his fountains 

Against the morning-star. 
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep 
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. 

A loftier Argo cleaves the main. 

Fraught with a later prize ; 
Another Orpheus sings again, 

And loves, and weeps, and dies. 
A new Ulysses leaves once more 
Calypso for his native shore. 

O, write no more the tale of Troy, 

If earth Death's scroll must be ! 
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy 

Which dawns upon the free : 
Although a subtler Sphinx renew 
Riddles of death Thebes never knew. 

Another Athens shall arise. 
And to remoter time 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 257 

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, 

The splendor of its prime ; 
And leave, if nought so bright may live, 
All earth can take or Heaven can give. 

Saturn and Love their long repose 
Shall burst, more bright and good 

Than all who fell, than One w^ho rose, 
Than many unsubdued : 

Not gold, not blood, their altar dov^^ers. 

But votive tears and symbol flowers. 

O cease ! must hate and death return ? 

Cease ! must men kill and die ? 
Cease ! drain not to its dregs the urn 

Of bitter prophecy. 
The world is weary of the past, 
O might it die or rest at last ! 

Hellas. 



THE NEW WORLD. 



Demogorgon. 



Thou, Earth, calm empire of a happy soul. 
Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies, 

Beautiful orb ! gathering as thou dost roll 

The love which paves thy path along the skies 

The Earth. 
I hear : I am as a drop of dew that dies. 



258 TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 

Demogorgon. 

Thou, Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth 

With wonder, as it gazes upon thee ; 
Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth 

Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony ; 

The Moon. 
I hear : I am a leaf shaken by thee ! 

Demogorgon. 

Ye kings of suns and stars. Daemons and Gods, 

Etherial Dominations, who possess 
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes 

Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness : 

A Voice from above. 
Our great Republic hears, we are blest, and bless. 

Demogorgon. 

Ye happy dead, whom beams of brightest verse 
Are clouds to hide, not colors to portray, 

Whether your nature is that universe 
Which once ye saw and suffered — 

A Voice from beneath. 

Or as they 
Whom we have left, we change and pass away. 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 259 

Demogorgon. 

Ye elemental Genii, who have homes 

From man's high mind even to the central stone 
Of sullen lead ; from Heaven's star-fretted domes 

To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on : 

A CONFUSED Voice. 
We hear : thy words waken Oblivion. 

Demogorgon. 

Spirits, whose homes are flesh : ye beasts and birds. 

Ye worms, and fish ; ye living leaves and buds ; 
Lightning and wind ; and ye untamable herds, 

Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes : 

A Voice. 
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods. 

Demogorgon. 

Man, who wert once a despot and a slave ; 

A dupe and a deceiver ; a decay ; 
A traveller from the cradle to the grave 

Through the dim night of this immortal day : 

All. 
Speak : thy strong words may never pass away. 



26o TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 

Demogorgon. 

This is the day, which down the void abysm 
At the Earth-bom's spell yawns for Heaven's despot- 
ism, 

And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep : 
Love, from its awful throne of patient power 
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour 

Of dead endurance, from the shppery, steep, 
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs 
And folds over the world its healing wings. 

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, 
These are the seals of that most firm assurance. 

Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength ; 
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, 
Mother of many acts and hours, should free 

The serpent that would clasp her with his length ; 
These are the spells by which to re-assume 
An empire o'er the disentangled doom. 

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite ; 
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night ; 

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent ; 
To love, and bear ; to hope till Hope creates 
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; 

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent ; 
This, like thy glory. Titan, is to be 
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free ; 
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. 

Pro7n. l/jibound. 1820. 



TO LIBERTY, GREECE, AND ITALY. 261 



Life may change, but it may fly not ; 
Hope may vanish, but can die not ; 
Truth be veil'd, but still it burneth ; 
Love repulsed, — but it returneth ! 

Yet were Life a charnel where 
Hope lay coffin'd with Despair ; 
Yet were truth a sacred lie, 
Love were lust — if Liberty 

Lent not life its soul of light, 
Hope its iris of delight. 
Truth its prophet's robe to wear, 
Love^its power to give and bear. 

Hellas. 



5C{)e Smsitibc ^lant. 



PART FIRST. 

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, 
And the young winds fed it with silver dew, 
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, 
And closed them beneath the kisses of night. 

And the Spring arose on the garden fair, 
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere ; 
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast 
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest. 

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss 
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness, 
Like a doe in the noon-tide with love's' sweet want. 
As the companionless Sensitive Plant. 

The snow-drop, and then the violet, 
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet. 
And their breath was mixed with fresh odor, sent 
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.. 

Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall. 
And narcissi, the fairest among them all. 
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess. 
Till they die of their own dear loveliness ; 
262 



THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 263 

And the Naiad-like lily of the vale, 
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale, 
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen 
Through their pavilions of tender green ; 

And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue. 
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew 
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense. 
It was felt like an odor within the sense ; 

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, 
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast. 
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air 
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare : 

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up. 
As a Maenad, its moonlight-colored cup. 
Till the fiery star, which is its eye, 
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky ; 

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose, 
The sweetest flower for scent that blows ; 
And all rare blossoms from every clime 
Grew in that garden in perfect prime. 

And on the stream whose inconstant bosom 
Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom, 
With golden and green light, slanting through 
Their heaven of many a tangled hue. 

Broad water-lilies lay tremulously. 

And starry river-buds glimmered by. 

And around them the soft stream did glide and dance 

With a motion of sweet sound and radiance. 



264 THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 

And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss, 
Which led through the garden along and across, 
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze, 
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees, 

Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells 
As fair as the fabulous asphodels, 
And flowrets which drooping as day drooped too 
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue, 
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew. 

And from this undefiled Paradise 
The flowers (as an infant's awakening eyes 
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet 
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it,) 

When Heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them, 
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem. 
Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one 
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun ; 

For each one was interpenetrated 
With the light and the odor its neighbor shed, 
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear 
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere. 

But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit 
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root. 
Received more than all, it loved more than ever, 
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver, 

For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower ; 
Radiance and odor are not its dower ; 
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full. 
It desires what it has not, the beautiful ! 



THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 265 

The light winds which from unsustaining wings 
Shed the music of many murmurings ; 
The beams which dart from many a star 
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar ; 

The plumed insects swift and free, 
Like golden boats on a sunny sea, 
Laden with light and odor, which pass 
Over the gleam of the living grass ; 

The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie 
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high, 
Then wander like spirits among the spheres. 
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears ; 

The. quivering vapors of dim noontide. 
Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide, 
In which every sound, and odor, and beam, 
Move, as reeds in a single stream ; 

Each and all like ministering angels were 
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear. 
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by 
Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky. 

And when evening descended from heaven above, 
And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love, 
And delight, tho' less bright, was far more deep. 
And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep, 

And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were 

drowned 
In an ocean of dreams without a sound ; 
Whose waves never mark, tho' they ever impress 
The light sand which paves it, consciousness ; 



266 THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 

(Only over head the sweet nightingale 

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail, 

And snatches of its Elysian chant 

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant). 

The Sensitive Plant was the earliest 
Up-gathered into the bosom of rest ; 
A sweet child weary of its delight ; 
The feeblest and yet the favorite, 
Cradled within the embrace of night. 



PART SECOND. 

There was a Power in this sweet place. 
An Eve in this Eden ; a ruling grace 
Which to the flowers did they waken or dream, 
Was as God is to the starry scheme. 

A Lady, the wonder of her kind, 
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind 
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion 
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean. 

Tended the garden from morn to even : 
And the meteors of that sublunar heaven, 
Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth. 
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth ! 

She had no companion of mortal race, 
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face 
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes 
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise : 



THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 267 

As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake 

Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake, 

As if yet around her he lingering were, 

Tho' the veil of daylight concealed him from her. 

Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest ; 
You might hear by the heaving of her breast, 
That the coming and going of the wind 
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind. 

And wherever her airy footstep trod, 
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod 
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep, 
Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep. 

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet 
Rejoice^ in the sound of her gentle feet ; 
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came 
From her glowing fingers thro' all their frame. 

She sprinkled bright water from the stream 
On those that were faint with the sunny beam ; 
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers 
She emptied the rain of the thunder showers. 

She lifted their heads with her tender hands, 
And sustained them with rods and with osier-bands ; 
If the flowers had been her own infants she 
Could never have nursed them more tenderly. 

And all killing insects and gnawing worms, 
And things of obscene and unlovely forms 
She bore in a basket of Indian woof. 
Into the rough woods far aloof. 



268 THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 

In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers fiill, 
The freshest her gentle hands could pull 
For the poor banished insects, whose intent, 
Although they did ill, was innocent. 

But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris 

Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that 

kiss 
The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she 
Make her attendant angels be. 

And many an antenatal tomb, 
Where butterflies dream of the life to come, 
She left clinging round the smooth and dark 
Edge of the odorous cedar bark. 

This fairest creature from earliest spring , 
Thus moved through the garden ministering 
All the sweet season of summer tide. 
And ere the first leaf looked brown — she died ! 



PART THIRD. 

Three days the flowers of the garden fair. 
Like stars when the moon is awakened, were, 
Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous 
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius. 

And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant 
Felt the sound of the funeral chaunt, 
And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow. 
And the sobs of the mourners deep and low ; 



THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 269 

The weary sound and the heavy breath, 
And the silent motions of passing death, 
And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank, 
Sent through the pores of the coffin plank ; 

The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass, 
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass ; 
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone, 
And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan. 

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul. 
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul, 
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep, 
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap 
To make men tremble who never weep. 

Swift summer into the autumn flowed, 
And frost in the mist of the morning rode. 
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright. 
Mocking the spoil of the secret night. 

The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow, 
Paved the turf and the moss below. 
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan, 
Like the head and the skin of a dying man. 

And Indian plants, of scent and hue 
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew, 
Leaf after leaf, day after day. 
Were massed into the common clay. 

And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red, 
And white with the whiteness of what is dead. 
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past ; 
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast. 



270 THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 

And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds 
Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds, 
Till they clung round many a sweet flower's stem, 
Which rotted into the earth with them. 

The water-blooms under the rivulet 
Fell from the stalks on which they were set ; 
And the eddies drove them here and there, 
As the winds did those of the upper air. 

Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks. 
Were bent and tangled across the walks ; 
And the leafless net-work of parasite bowers 
Massed into ruin ; and all sweet flowers. 

Between the time of the wind and the snow, 

All loathliest weeds began to grow, 

Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck, 

Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back. 

And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank, 
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank, 
Stretched out its long and hollow shank, 
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank. 

And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath, 
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth, 
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue. 
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew. 

And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould 
Started like mist from the wet ground cold ; 
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead 
With a spirit of growth had been animated ! 



THE SENSITIVE PLANT. 271 

Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake, 
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer's stake, 
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high, 
Infecting the winds that wander by. 

Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum. 

Made the running rivulet thick and dumb 

And at its outlet flags huge as stakes 

Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes. 

And hour by hour, when the air was still. 
The vapors arose which have strength to kill : 
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt. 
At night they were darkness no star could melt. 

And unctuous meteors from spray to spray 
Crept and flitted in broad noon-day 
Unseen ; every branch on which they alit 
By a venomous blight was burned and bit. 

The Sensitive Plant like one forbid 
Wept, and the tears within each lid 
Of its folded leaves which together grew 
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue. 

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon 
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn ; 
The sap shrank to the root through every pore 
As blood to a heart that will beat no more. 

For Winter came : the wind was his whip : 
One choppy finger was on his lip : 
He had torn the cataracts from the hills 
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles ; 



272 THE SENSITIVE PIANT. 

His breath was a chain which without a sound 
The earth, and the air, and the water bound ; 
He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne 
By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone. 

Then the weeds which were forms of living death 
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath. 
Their decay and sudden flight from frost 
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost ! 

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant 
The moles and the dormice died for want : 
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air 
And were caught in the branches naked and bare. 

First there came down a thawing rain 
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again, 
Then there steamed up a freezing dew 
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew ; 

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about 
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, 
Shook the boughs thus laden and heavy and stiff, 
And snapped them off with his rigid griff. 

When winter had gone and spring came back 

The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck ; 

But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and 

darnels. 
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels. 



THE SENSITIVE PLANT ^^ 



CONCLUSION. 

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that 
Which within its boughs like a spirit s.il 
Ere its outward form had known decay, 
Now felt this change, I cannot say. 

Whether that lady's gentle mind. 
No longer with the form combini'ici 
Which scattered love, as stars do li^'ht, 
Found sadness, where it left deKgh^ 

I dare not guess ; but in this life 
Of error, ignorance, and strife, 
Where nothing is, but all things c^etmi 
And we the shadows of the dream, 

It is a modest creed, and yet 
Pleasant if one considers it, 
To own that death itself mus) he. 
Like all the rest, a mockery. 

That garden sweet, that lady fair. 
And all sweet shapes and odors there, 
In truth have never past away : 
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed ; not they. 

For love, and beauty, and delight. 
There is no death nor change : their might 
Exceeds our organs, which endure 
No light, being themselves obscure. 

1820. 



Hasit iLobe Poems. 



TO EDWARD WILLIAMS. 

The serpent is shut out from paradise. 

The wounded deer must seek the herb no more 

In which its heart-cure lies : 
The widowed dove must cease to haunt a bower 
Like that from which its mate with feigned sighs 
Fled in the April hour. 
I too must seldom seek again 
Near happy friends a mitigated pain. 

Of hatred I am proud, — with scorn content ; 

Indifference, that once hurt me, now is grown 

Itself indifferent. 
But, not to speak of love, pity alone 
Can break a spirit already more than bent. 
The miserable one 
Turns the mind's poison into food, — 
Its medicine is tears, — its evil good. 

Therefore, if now I see you seldomer, 

Dear friends, dt2iY friend ! know that I only fly 
Your looks, because they stir 
274 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 275 

Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot 
die : 
The very comfort that they minister 
I scarce can bear, yet I, 
So deeply is the arrow gone, 
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn. 

When I return to my cold home, you ask 
Why I am not as I have ever been. 

You spoil me for the task 
Of acting a forced part in life's dull scene, — 
Of wearing on my brow the idle mask 
Of author, great or mean, 
In the world's carnival. I sought 
Peace thus, and but in you I found it not. 

Full half an hour, to-day, I tried my lot 

With various flowers, and every one still said, 

" She loves me loves me not." 

And if this meant a vision long since fled — 
If it meant fortune, fame, or peace of thought — 
If it meant, — but I dread 
To speak what you may know too well : 
Still there was truth in the sad oracle. 

The crane o'er seas and forests seeks her home ; 
No bird so wild but has its quiet nest. 

When it no more would roam ; 
The sleepless billows on the ocean's breast 
Break like a bursting heart, and die in foam. 
And thus at length find rest. 
Doubtless there is a place of peace 
Where my weak heart and all its throbs will cease. 



276 LAST LOVE POEMS. 

I asked her, yesterday, if she believed 

That I had resolution. One who had 

Would ne'er have thus relieved 
His heart with words, — but what his judgment 
bade 
Would do, and leave the scorner unrelieved. 
These verses are too sad 
To send to you, but that I know, 
Happy yourself, you feel another's woe. 

1821. 



SONG. 

Rarely, rarely, comest thou, 

Spirit of Delight ! 
Wherefore hast thou left me now 

Many a day and night ? 
Many a weary night and day 
'Tis since thou art fled away. 

How shall ever one like me 

Win thee back again? 
With the joyous and the free 

Thou wilt scoff at pain. 
Spirit false ! thou hast forgot 
All but those who need thee not. 

As a lizard with the shade 

Of a trembling leaf, 
Thou with sorrow art dismayed ; 

Even the sighs of grief 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 277 

Reproach thee, that thou art not near, 
And reproach thou wilt not hear. 

Let me set my mournful ditty 

To a merry measure, 
Thou wilt never come for pity, 

Thou wilt come for pleasure. 
Pity then will cut away 
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay. 

I love all that thou lovest, 

Spirit of Delight ! 
The fresh Earth in new leaves drest, 

And the starry night ; 
Autumn evening, and the morn 
When the golden mists are born. 

I love snow, and all the forms 

Of the radiant frost ; 
I love waves, and winds, and storms, 

Every thing almost 
Which is Nature's, and may be 
Untainted by man's misery. 

I love tranquil solitude, 

And such society 
As is quiet, wise and good ; 

Between thee and me 
What difference ? but thou dost possess 
The things I seek, not love them less. 

I love Love — though he has wings, 
And like light can flee, 



278 LAST LOVE POEMS. 

But above all other things, . 

Spirit, I love thee — 
Thou art love and life ! O come, 
Make once more my heart thy home. 

1821, 



A LAMENT. 

Oh, world ! oh, life ! oh, time ! 
On whose last steps I climb 

Trembling at that where I had stood before ; 
When will return the glory of your prime? 
No more — O, never more ! 

Out of the day and night 
A joy has taken flight ; 

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar. 
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight 
No more — O, never more ! 

1821. 



A DIRGE. 

Rough wind, that meanest loud 

Grief too sad for song ; 
Wild wind, when sullen cloud 

Knells all the night long ; 
Sad storm, whose tears are vain, 
Bare woods, whose branches strain. 
Deep caves and dreary main. 

Wail, for the world's wrong ! 

1822. 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 279 



TO . 

One word is too often profaned 

For me to profane it, 
One feeling too falsely disdained 

For thee to disdain it. 
One hope is too like despair 

For prudence to smother, 
And pity from thee more dear 

Than that from another. 

I can give not what men call love, 

But wilt thou accept not 
The worship the heart lifts above 

And the Heavens reject not, 
The desire of the moth for the star, 

Of the night for the morrow. 
The devotion to something afar 

From the sphere of our sorrow? 

1821. 



LINES. 

When the lamp is shattered 
The light in the dust lies dead — 

When the cloud is scattered 
The rainbow's glory is shed. 

When the lute is broken, 
Sweet tones are remembered not ; 

When the lips have spoken. 
Loved accents are soon forgot. 



28o LAST LOVE POEMS. 

As music and splendor 
Survive not the lamp and the lute, 

The heart's echoes render 
No song when the spirit is mute : — 

No song but sad dirges, 
Like the wind through a ruined cell. 

Or the mournful surges 
That ring the dead seaman's knell. 

When hearts have once mingled 
Love first leaves the well-built nest, 

The weak one is singled 
To endure what it once possest. 

O, Love! who bewailest 
The frailty of all things here. 

Why choose you the frailest 
For your cradle, your home and your bier? 

Its passions will rock thee 
As the storms rock the ravens on high : 

Bright reason will mock thee, 
Like the sun from a wintry sky. 

From thy nest every rafter 
Will rot, and thine eagle home 

Leave thee naked to laughter, 
When leaves fall and cold winds come. 

1822. 



TO . 

When passion's trance is overpast, 
If tenderness and truth could last 
Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 281 

Some mortal slumber, dark and deep, 
I should not weep, I should not weep ! 

It were enough to feel, to see, 

Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly. 

And dream the rest — and burn and be 

The secret food of fires unseen, 

Couldst thou but be as thou hast been. 

After the slumber of the year 
The woodland violets re-appear. 
All things revive in field or grove, 
And sky and sea, but two, which move, 
And form all others, life and love. 

1821. 



WITH A GUITAR, TO JANE. 

Ariel to Miranda. — Take 
This slave of Music, for the sake 
Of him who is the slave of thee. 
And teach it all the harmony 
In which thou canst, and only thou, 
Make the delighted spirit glow, 
Till joy denies itself again. 
And, too intense, is turned to pain ; 
For by permission and command 
Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, 
Poor Ariel sends this silent token 
Of more than ever can be spoken ; 
Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who, 
From life to life, must still pursue 
Your happiness ; — for thus alone 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 

Can Ariel ever iind his own. 

From Prosperu's enchanted cell, 

As the mighty verses tell, 

To the throne of Naples, he 

Lit you o'er the trackless sea, 

Flitting on, your prow before. 

Like a living meteor. 

When you die, the silent Moon 

In her interlunar swoon, 

Is not sadder in her cell 

Than deserted Ariel. 

When you live again on earth, 

Like an unseen star of birth, 

Ariel guides you o'er the sea 

Of life from your nativity. 

Many changes have been run, 

Since Ferdinand and you begun 

Your course of love, and Ariel still 

Has tracked your steps, and served your will 

Now, in humbler, happier lot, 

This is all remembered not ; 

And now, alas ! the poor sprite is 

Imprisoned, for some fault of his, 

In a body like a grave ; — 

From you he only dares to crave, 

For his service and his sorrow, 

A smile to-day, a song to-morrow. 

The artist who this idol wrought, 
To echo all harmonious thought, 
Felled a tree, while on the steep 
The woods were in their winter sleep, 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 283 

Rocked in that repose divine 

On the wind-swept Apennine ; 

And dreaming, some of Autumn past, 

And some of Spring approaching fast, 

And some of April buds and showers, 

And some of songs in July bowers, 

And all of love ; and so this tree, — 

O that such our death may be ! — 

Died in sleep, and felt no pain. 

To live in happier form again : 

From which, beneath Heaven's fairest star, 

The artist wrought this loved Guitar, 

And taught it justly to reply. 

To all who question skilfully. 

In language gentle as thine own ; 

Whispering in enamored tone 

Sweet oracles of woods and dells, 

And summer winds in sylvan cells ; 

For it had learnt all harmonies 

Of the plains and of the skies. 

Of the forests and the mountains, 

And the many-voiced fountains ; 

The clearest echoes of the hills, 

The softest notes of falling rills, 

The melodies of birds and bees, 

The murmuring of summer seas. 

And pattering rain, and breathing dew, 

And airs of evening ; and it knew 

That seldom-heard mysterious sound, 

Which, driven on its diurnal round, 

As it floats through boundless day, 

Our world enkindles on its way — r 



284 LAST LOVE POEMS. 

All this it knows, but will not tell 
To those who cannot question well 
The spirit that inhabits it ; 
It talks according to the wit 
Of its companions ; and no more 
Is heard than has been felt before, 
By those who tempt it to betray 
These secrets of an elder day : 
But sweetly as its answers will 
Flatter hands of perfect skill, 
It keeps its highest, holiest tone 
For our beloved Jane alone. 



TO JANE — THE INVITATION. 

Best and brightest, come away ! 
Fairer far than this fair Day, 
Which, like thee to those in sorrow, 
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow 
To the rough Year just awake 
In its cradle on the brake. 
The brightest hour of unborn Spring, 
Through the winter wandering. 
Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn 
To hoar February born ; 
Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, 
It kissed the forehead of the Earth, 
And smiled upon the silent sea, 
And bade the frozen streams be free. 
And waked to music all their fountains. 



[822. 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 285 

And breathed upon the frozen mountains, 
And like a prophetess of May 
Strewed flowers upon the barren way, 
Making the wintry world appear 
Like one on whom thou smilest, dear. 
Away, away, from men and towns, 
To the wild wood and the downs — 
To the silent wilderness 
Where the soul need not repress 
Its music lest it should not fin^ 
An echo in another's mind, 
While the touch of Nature's art 
Harmonizes heart to heart. 

Radiant Sister of the Day, 
Awake ! arise ! and come away ! 
To the wild woods and the plains, 
And the pools where winter rains 
Image all their roof of leaves, 
Where the pine its garland weaves 
Of sapless green and ivy dun 
Round stems that never kiss the sun ; 
Where the lawns and pastures be, 
And the sand-hills of the sea ; — 
Where the melting hoar-frost wets 
The daisy-star that never sets, 
And wind-flowers, and violets. 
Which yet join not scent to hue, 
Crown the pale year weak and new ; 
When the night is left behind 
In the deep east, dun and blind. 
And the blue noon is over us, 



286 LAST LOVE POEMS. 

And the multitudinous 

Billows murmur at our feet, 

Where the earth and ocean meet, 

And all things seem only one 

In the universal sun. 

1822. 



TO JANE — THE RECOLLECTION. 

Now the last day of many days, 
All beautiful and bright as thou, 
The loveliest and the last, is dead, 
Rise, Memory, and write its praise ! 
Up, to thy wonted work ! come, trace 

The epitaph of glory fled, — 
For now the Earth has changed its face, 
A frown is on the Heaven's brow. 

We wandered to the pine forest 

That skirts the Ocean's foam. 
The lightest wind was in its nest. 

The tempest in its home. 
The whispering waves were half asleep, 

The clouds were gone to play. 
And on the bosom of the deep, 

The smile of Heaven lay ; 
It seemed as if the hour w-ere one 

Sent from beyond the skies. 
Which scattered from above the sun 

A light of Paradise 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 2«7 

We paused amid the pines that stood 

The giants of the waste, 
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude 

As serpents interlaced, 
And soothed by every azure breath, 

That under heaven is blown, 
To harmonies and hues beneath, 

As tender as its own ;♦ 
Now all the tree-tops lay asleep, 

Like green waves on the sea, 
As still as in the silent deep 

The ocean woods may be. 

How calm it was ! — the silence there 

By such a chain was bound 
That even the busy woodpecker 

Made stiller by her sound 
The inviolable quietness ; 

The breath of peace we drew 
With its soft motion made not less 

The calm that round us grew. 
There seemed from the remotest seat 

Of the white mountain waste, 
To the soft flower beneath our feet, 

A magic circle traced, — 

A spirit interfused around, 

A thrilling silent life. 
To momentary peace it bound 

Our mortal nature's strife ; — 
And still I felt the centre of 

The magic circle there. 



288 LAST LOVE POEMS. 

Was one fair form that filled with love 
The lifeless atmosphere. 

We paused beside the pools that lie 

Under the forest bough, 
Each seemed as 'twere a little sky 

Gulfed in a world below ; 
A firmament x)f purple light, 

Which in the dark earth lay, 
More boundless than the depth of night, 

And purer than the day — 
In which the lovely forests grew 

As in the upper air, 
More perfect both in shape and hue 

Than any spreading there. 

There lay the glade and neighboring lawn, 

And through the dark green wood 
The white sun twinkling like the dawn 

Out of a speckled cloud. 
Sweet views which in our world above 

Can never well be seen, 
Were imaged by the water's love 

Of that fair forest green. 
And all was interfused beneath 

With an elysian glow, 
An atmosphere without a breath, 

A softer day below. 

Like one beloved the scene had lent 

To the dark water's breast. 
Its every lear and lineament 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 289 

With more than truth exprest ; 
Until an envious wind crept by, 

Like an unwelcome thought, 
Which from the mind's too faithful eye 

Blots one dear image out. 
Though thou art ever fair and kind, 

The forests ever green, 
Less oft is peace in Shelley's mind, 

Than calm in waters seen. 

1822. 



REMEMBRANCE. 

Swifter far than summer's flight — 
Swifter far than youth's delight — 
Swifter far than happy night, 

Art thou come and gone — 
As the wood when leaves are shed, 
As the night when sleep is fled, 
As the heart when joy is dead, 
I am left lone, alone. 

The swallow summer comes again — 
The owlet night resumes his reign — 
But the wild-swan youth is fain 

To fly with thee, false as thou. — 
My heart each day desires the morrow ; 
Sleep itself is turned to sorrow ; 
Vainly would my winter borrow 

Sunny leaves from any bough. 



290 LAST LOVE POEMS. 

Lilies for a bridal bed — 
Roses for a matron's head — 
Violets for a maiden dead — 

Pansies let ;/// flowers be : 
On the living grave I bear 
Scatter them without a tear — 
Let no friend, however dear, 
Waste one hope, one fear for me. 

1821, 



LINES WRITTEN IN THE BAY OF LERICI. 

She left me at the silent time 

When the moon had ceased to climb 

The azure path of Heaven's steep, 

And like an albatross asleep, 

Balanced on her wings of light, 

Hovered in the purple night. 

Ere she sought her ocean nest 

In the chambers of the West. 

She left me, and I staid alone 

Thinking over every tone 

Which, though silent to the ear, 

The enchanted heart could hear. 

Like notes which die when born, but still 

Haunt the echoes of the hill ; 

And feeling ever — O too much ! — 

The soft vibration of her touch, 

As if her gentle hand, even now, 

Lightly trembled on my brow ; 

And thus, although she absent were. 

Memory gave me all of her 



LAST LOVE POEMS. 29 1 

That even Fancy dares Xo claim : — 

Her presence had made weak and tame 

All passions, and I lived alone 

In the time which is our own ; 

The past and future were forgot, 

As they had been, and would be, not- 

But soon, the guardian angel gone, 

The daemon reassumed his throne 

In my faint heart. I dare not speak 

My thoughts, but thus disturbed and weak 

I sat and saw the vessels glide 

Over the ocean bright and wide. 

Like spirit-winged chariots sent 

O^er some serenest element 

For ministrations strange and far ; 

As if to some Elysian star 

Sailed for drink to medicine 

Such sweet and bitter pain as mine. 

And the wind that winged their flight 

From the land came fresh and light, 

And the scent of winged flowers, 

And the coolness of the hours 

Of dew, and sweet warmth left by day, 

Were scattered o'er the twinkling bay. 

And the fisher with his lamp 

And spear about the low rocks damp 

Crept, and struck the fish which came 

To worship the delusive flame. 

Too happy they, whose pleasure sought 

Extinguishes all sense and thought 

Of the regret that pleasure leaves. 

Destroying life alone, not peace ! 

1822. 



292 LAST LOVE POEMS. 



TO . 

Music, when soft voices die, 
Vibrates in the memory ; 
Odors, when sweet violets sicken, 
Live within the sense they quicken ; 

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, 

Are heaped for the beloved's bed ; 

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone. 

Love itself shall slumber on. 

1821. 



AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS. 



NOv 5^ davojv Xd/JLTreLS ecnrepos ev (pdifx^vois. 

Plato. . 
PREFACE. 

It is my intention to subjoin to the London edition of this 
poem a criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to 
be classed among the writers of the highest genius who have 
adorned our age. My known repugnance to the narrow 
principles of taste on which several of his earlier compositions 
were rfiodelled, prove, at least that I am an impartial judge. 
I consider the fragment of " Hyperion " as second to nothing 
that was ever produced by a writer of the same years, 

John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty- 
fourth year, on the of 1821 ; and was buried in 

the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that 
city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and 
the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, 
which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery 
is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with 
violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, 
to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. 

The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I 
have dedicated these unworthy verses, was not less delicate 
and fragile than it was beautiful; and where cankerworms 
abound, what wonder, if its young flower was blighted in 

293 



294 ADONAIS. 

the bud ? The savage criticism on his " Endymion," which 
appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent 
effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated 
ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs ; a rapid 
consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments 
from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, 
were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted. 

It may be well said, that these wretched men know not what 
they do. They scatter their insults and their slanders without 
heed as to whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made 
callous by many blows, or one, hke Keats's, composed of more 
penetrable stuff. One of their associates, is, to my knowledge, 
a most base and unprincipled calumniator. As to " En- 
dymion ; " was it a poem, whatever might be its defects, to be 
treated contemptuously by those who had celebrated with 
various degrees of complacency and panegyric, " Paris," and 
"Woman," and a "Syrian Tale," and Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. 
Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of the illustrious 
obscure? Are these the men, who in their venal good nature, 
presumed to draw a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman 
and Lord Byron? What gnat did they strain at here, after 
having swallowed all those camels? Against what woman 
taken in adultery, dares the foremost of these literary prosti- 
tutes to cast his opprobrious stone? Miserable man ! you, 
one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest 
specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor shall it be your 
excuse, that murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers,, 
but used none. 

The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats's life 
were not made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the 
press. I am given to understand that the wound which his 
sensitive spirit had received from the criticism of " Endymion," 
was exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits ; 
the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of 
life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of 
his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune 
and his care. He was accompanied to Rome, and attended 



AD ON A IS. _ 295 

in his last illness by Mr. Severn, a young artist of the highest 
promise, who, I have been informed, " almost risked his own 
life, and sacrificed every prospect to unwearied attendance 
upon his dying friend," Had I known these circumstances 
before the completion of my poem, I should have been tempted 
to add my feeble tribute of applause to the more solid recom- 
pense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his 
own motives. Mr. Severn can dispense with a reward from 
" such stuff as dreams are made of." His conduct is a golden 
augury of the success of his future career — may the unextin- 
guished Spirit of his illustrious friend animate the creations 
of his pencil, and plead against Oblivion for his name ! 



I WEEP for Adonais — he is dead ! 
O, weep for Adonais ! though our tears 
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head ! 
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years 
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, 
And teach them thine own sorrow, say : " with me 
Died Adonais ; till the Future dares 
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be 
An echo and a light unto eternity ! " 

Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay, 
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies 
In darkness? where was lorn Urania 
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes, 
'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise 
She sate, while one, with soft enamored breath, 
Rekindled all the fading melodies, 
With which, like flowers that mock the corse be- 
neath, 
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death. 



296 ADONAIS. 

O, weep for Adonais — he is dead ! 
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! 
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed 
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep 
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep ; 
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair 
Descend ; — oh, dream not that the amorous Deep 
Will yet restore him to thfe vital air ; 
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our 
despair. 

Most musical of mourners, weep again! 
Lament anew, Urania! — He died. 
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain. 
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride. 
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide. 
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite 
Of lust and blood ; he went, unterrified. 
Into the gulf of death ; but his clear Sprite 
Yet reigns o'er earth ; the third among the sons of 
light. 

Most musical of mourners, weep anew ! 
Not all to that bright station dared to climb ; 
And happier they their happiness who knew, 
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time 
In which suns perished ; others more sublime. 
Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, 
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime ; 
And some yet live, treading the thorny road. 
Which leads, through toil and bate, to Fame's serene 
abode. 



AD ON A IS. 297 

But now, thy youngest, dearest one has perished, 
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew, 
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, 
And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew ; 
Most musical of mourners, weep anew! 
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last. 
The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew 
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste ; 
The broken lily lies — the storm is overpast. 

To that high Capital, where kingly Death 
Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay. 
He came ; and bought, with price of purest breath, 
A grave among the eternal. — Come away! 
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day 
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof ! while still 
He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay ; 
Awake him not! surely he takes his fill 
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill. 

He will awake no more, oh, never more! — 
Within the twilight chamber spreads apace, 
The shadow of white Death, and at the door 
Invisible Corruption waits to trace 
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place ; 
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe 
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface 
So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law 
Of change, shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw. 

O, weep for Adonais ! — The quick Dreams, 
The passion-winged Ministers of thought. 



298 ADONAIS. 

Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught 
The love which was its music, wander not, — 
Wander no more, from kindhng brain to brain, 
But droop there, whence they sprung ; and mourn 

their lot 
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain. 
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again. 

And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head. 
And fans him with her moonlight wings and cries ; 
" Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead ; 
Sep, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, 
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies 
A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain." 
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise ! 
She knew not 'twas her own ; as with no stain 
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain. 

One from a lucid urn of starry dew 
Washed his light limbs as if embalmi-qg them ; 
Another dipt her profuse locks, and threw 
The wreath upon him, like an anadem. 
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem ; 
Another in her wilful grief would bre^k 
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to st^m 
A greater loss with one which was mo^'e weak ; 
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek. 

Another Splendor on his mouth alit. 
That mouth, whence it was wont to drav- the breath 
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit. 
And pass into the panting heart beneath 



ADONAIS. 299 

With lightning and with music : the damp death 
Quenched its caress upon his icy Hps ; 
And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath 
Of moonhght vapor, which the cold night clips, 
It flushed through his pale limbs, and past to its 
eclipse. 

And others came . . . Desires and Adorations, 
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, 
. Splendors, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarna- 
tions 
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies ; 
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, 
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam 
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes. 
Came in slow pomp ; — the moving pomp might 
seem 
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream. 

All he had loved, and moulded into thought. 
From shape, and hue, and odor, and sweet sound, 
Lagiented Adonais. Morning sought 
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, 
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground. 
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day ; 
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned. 
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay. 
And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dis- 
may. 

Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, 
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay, 
And will no more reply to winds or fountains, 



300 ADONAIS. 

Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, 
Or herdsman^s horn, or bell at closing day ; 
Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear 
Than those for whose disdain she pined away 
Into a shadow of all sounds : — a drear 
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen 
hear. 

Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw 

down 
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were. 
Or they dead leaves ; since her delight is flown 
For whom should she have waked the sullen year? 
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear 
Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both 
Thou, Adonais : wan they stand and sere 
Amid the faint companions of their youth. 
With dew all turned to tears ; odor, to sighing ruth. 

Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale 
Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain ; 
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale 
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain 
Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain, 
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest, 
As Albion wails for thee : the curse of Cain 
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast, 
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest ! 

Ah woe is me ! Winter is come and gone, 
But grief returns with the revolving 3'ear ; 
The airs and streams renew the^r joyous tone ; 
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear ; 



AD ON A IS. 301 

Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' 

bier ; 
The amorous birds now pair in every brake, 
And build their mossy homes in field and brere ; 
And the green Hzard, and the golden snake, 
Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake. 

Through wood, and stream, and field, and hill, and 

Ocean, 
A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst 
As it has ever done, with change and motion, 
From the great morning of the world when first 
God dawned on Chaos ; in its steam immersed 
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light ; 
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst ; 
Diffuse themselves ; and spend in love's delight. 
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might. 

The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender, 
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath ; 
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendor 
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death 
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath ; 
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which 

knows 
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath 
By sightless lightning? — th' intense atom glows 
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. 

Alas ! that all we loved of him should be. 
But for our grief, as if it had not been. 
And grief itself be mortal ! Woe is me ! 



302 ADONAIS. 

Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene 

The actors or spectators? Great and mean 

Meet massed in death, who lends what life must 

borrow. 
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, 
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, 
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to 

sorrow. 

He will awake no more, oh, never more ! 
" Wake thou," cried Misery, " childless Mother, rise 
Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core, 
A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs." 
And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes, 
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song 
Had held in holy silence, cried : " Arise ! " 
Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung, 
From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendor sprung. 

She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs 
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear 
The golden Day, which, on eternal wings, 
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier. 
Had left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear 
So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania ; 
So saddened round her like an atmosphere 
Of stormy mist ; so swept her on her way 
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay. 

Out of her secret Paradise she sped, 
Through camps and cities rough with stone, and 
steel, 



AD ON A IS. 303 

And human hearts, which to her aery tread 
Yielding not, wounded the invisible 
Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell : 
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than 

they 
Rent the soft Form they never could repel, 
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May 
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way. 

In the death-chamber for a moment Death, 
Shamed by the presence of that living Might, 
Blushed to annihilation, and the breath 
Revisited those lips, and life's pale light 
Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear de- 
light. 
"Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless, 
As silent lightning leaves the starless night ! 
Leave me not! " cried Urania: her distress 
Roused Death : Death rose and smiled, and met her 
vain caress. 

" Stay yet awhile ! speak to me once again ; 

Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live ; 

And in my heartless breast and burning brain 

That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else sur- 
vive, 

With food of saddest memory kept alive, 

Now thou art dead, as if it were a part 

Of thee, my Adonais ! I would give 

All that I am to be as thou now art ! 
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence de- 
part ! 



304 A DONA IS. 

" Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, 

Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men 

Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty 

heart 
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den ? 
Defenceless as thou wert, oh, where was then 
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear ? 
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when 
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere, 
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like 

deer. 

" The herded wolves, bold only to pursue ; 
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead ; 
The vultures to the conqueror's banner true 
Who feed where Desolation first has fed. 
And whose wings rain contagion ; — how they fled, 
When like Apollo, from his golden bow, 
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped 
And smiled ! — The spoilers tempt no second blow, 
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying 
low. 

" The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn ; 
He sets, and each ephemeral insect then 
Is gathered into death without a dawn, 
And the immortal stars awake again ; 
So is it in the world of living men : 
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight 
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when 
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light 
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night." 



ADONAIS. 305 

Thus ceased she : and the mountain shepherds 

came, 
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent ; 
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame 
Over his hving head like Heaven is bent, 
An early but enduring monument, 
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song 
In sorrow ; from her wilds lerne sent 
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong, 
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue. 

Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, 
A phantom among men ; companionless 
As the last cloud of an expiring storm 
Whose thunder is its knell ; he, as I guess, 
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, 
Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray 
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, 
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, 
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their 
prey. 

A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift — 
A Love in desolation masked ; — a Power 
Girt round with weakness ; — it can scarce uplift 
The weight of the superincumbent hour ; 
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, 
A breaking billow ; — even whilst we speak 
Is it not broken ? On the withering flower 
The killing sun smiles brightly : on a cheek 
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may 
break. 



3o6 ADONAIS. 

His head was bound with pansies overblown, 
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue ; 
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone. 
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew 
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew, 
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart 
Shook the weak hand that grasped it ; of that crew 
He came the last, neglected and apart ; 
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart. 

All stood aloof, and at his partial moan 

Smiled through their tears ; well knew that gentle 

band 
Who in another's fate now w^ept his own ; 
As in the accents of an unknown land, 
He sung new sorrow ; sad Urania scanned 
The Stranger's mien, and murmured : " Who art 

thou ? " 
He answered not, but with a sudden hand 
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, 
Which was like Cain's or Christ's — Oh! that it should 

be so ! 

What softer voice is hushed over the dead ? 
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown ? 
What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed. 
In mockery of monumental stone, 
The heavy heart heaving without a moan ? 
If it be He, who, gentlest of the wise, 
Taught, soothed, loved, honored the departed one ; 
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs 
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice. 



A DON ATS. 307 

Our Adonais has drunk poison — oh ! 
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown 
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe ? 
The nameless worm would now itself disown : 
It felt, yet could escape the magic tone 
Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong, 
But what was howling in one breast alone, 
Silent with expectation of the song. 
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre un- 
strung. 

Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame ! 
Live ! fear no heavier chastisement from me, 
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name ! 
But be thyself, and know thyself to be ! 
And ever at thy season be thou free 
To spill the venom when thy fangs overflow : 
Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee ; 
Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow, 
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt — as 
now. 

Nor let us weep that our delight is fled 
Far from these carrion kites that scream below ; 
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead ; 
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. — 
Dust to the dust ! but the pure spirit shall flow 
Back to the burning fountain whence it came, 
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow 
Through time and change, unquenchably the same, 
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of 
shame. 



3o8 A DONA IS. 

Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — - 
He hath awakened from the dream of Hfe — 
^Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep ' 
With phantoms an unprofitable strife, 
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife 
Invulnerable nothings. — We decay 
Like corpses in a charnel ; fear and grief 
Convulse us and consume us day by day. 
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living 
clay. 

He has outsoared the shadow of our night ; 
Envy, and calumny, and hate, and pain. 
And that unrest which men miscall delight, 
Can touch him not and torture not again ; 
From the contagion of the world's slow stain 
He is secure, and now can never mourn 
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain ; 
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, 
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. 

He lives, he wakes — 'tis Death is dead, not he ; 
Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn 
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee 
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone ; 
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan ! 
Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou 

Air 
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown 
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare 
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its de- 
spair ! 



AD ON A IS. 309 

He is made one with Nature : there is heard 
His voice in all her music, from the moan 
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird ; 
He is a presence to be felt and known 
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, 
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move 
Which has withdrawn his being to its own ; 
Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. 

He is a portion of the loveliness 
Which once he made more lovely : he doth bear 
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress 
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling 

there. 
All new successions to the forms they wear ; 
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight 
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ; 
And bursting in its beauty and its might 
From trees, and beasts, and men, into the Heavens' 

light. 

The splendors of the firmament of time 
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not ; 
Like stars to their appointed height they climb 
And death is a low mist which cannot blot 
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought 
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair. 
And love and life contend in it, for what 
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there 
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy 
air. 



3IO ADONAIS. 

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown 

Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal 

thought, 
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton 
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not 
Yet faded from him ; Sidney, as he fought, 
And as he fell, and as he lived, and loved 
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot. 
Arose ; and Lucan, by his death approved : 
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. 

And many more, whose names on earth are dark 
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die 
So long as fire outlives the parent spark, 
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality. 
^'Thou art become as one of us,'' they cry, 
" It w^as for thee yon kingless sphere has long 
Swung blind in unascended majesty, 
Silent alone amid a Heaven of Song. 
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our 
throng ! " 

Who mourns for Adonais ? oh, come forth 
Fond wretch ! and know thyself and him aright. 
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth ; 
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light 
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might 
Satiate the void circumference : then shrink 
Even to a point within our day and night ; 
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink 
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the 
brink. 



ADONAIS. 311 

Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre 
Oh, not of him, but of our joy : 'tis nought 
That ages, empires, and religions there 
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought ; 
For such as he can lend, — they borrow not 
Glory from those who made the world their prey ; 
And he is gathered to the kings of thought 
Who waged contention with their time's decay, 
And of the past are all that cannot pass away. 

Go thou to Rome, — at once the Paradise, 

The grave, the city, and the wilderness ; 

And where its wrecks like shattered mountains 

rise. 
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress 
The bones of Desolation's nakedness 
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead 
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access 
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead, 
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. 

And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time 
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand ; 
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, 
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned 
This refuge for his memory, doth stand 
Like flame transformed to marble ; and beneath, 
A field is spread, on which a newer band 
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of 
death 
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished 
breath. 



312 AD ON A IS. 

Here pause : these graves are all too young as yet 
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned 
Its charge to each ; and if the seal is set, 
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, 
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find 
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, 
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind 
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. 
What Adonais is, why fear we to become ? 

The One remains, the many change and pass ; 
Heaven's light forever shines. Earth's shadows fly ; 
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass. 
Stains the w^hite radiance of Eternity, 
Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die, 
If thou w^ouldst be with that which thou dost seek! 
Follow where all is fled ! — Rome's azure sky. 
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak 
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. 

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? 
Thy hopes are gone before : from all things here 
They have departed ; thou shouldst now depart! 
A light is past from the revolving year, 
And man, and woman ; and what still is dear 
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. 
The soft sky smiles, — the low wind whispers near ; 
'Tis Adonais calls ! oh, hasten thither. 
No more let Life divide what Death can join together. 

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
That Beauty in which all things work and move, 



ADONAIS. Z^Z 

That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse 
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love 
Which through the web of being blindly wove 
By man, and beast, and earth, and air, and sea, 
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of 
The fire for which all thirst ; now beams on me. 
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. 

The breath whose might I have invoked in song 
Descends on me ; my spirit's bark is driven, 
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng 
Whose sails were never to the tempest given : 
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! 
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar ; 
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, 
The soul of Adonais, like a star. 
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 

1821. 



314 ODE TO THE WEST WIND. 



ODE TO THE WEST WIND. 



O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being. 
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 
Are driven, Hke ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 



Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red. 
Pestilence-stricken multitudes : O, thou, 
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 



The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low. 
Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
With living hues and odors plain and hill : 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere ; 
Destroyer and preserver ; hear, O hear ! 

II. 

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commo- 
tion 
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed. 
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 

Angels of rain and lightning : there are spread 
On the blue surface of thine airy surge. 
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 



ODE TO THE WEST WIND. 315 

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge 

Of the horizon to the zenith's height 

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge 

Of the dying year, to which this closing night 
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 
Vaulted vv^ith all thy congregated might 

Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere 

Black rain, and fire, and hail wi^ burst : O hear ! 

III. 

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, 

B-side a pumice isle in Baise's bay, 
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 
Quivering within the wave's intenser day. 

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers 

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them ! Thou 

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear 
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear. 
And tremble and despoil themselves : O hear! 

IV. 

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear ; 

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee ; 

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 



3i6 ODE TO THE WEST WIND. 

The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even 
I were as in my boyhood, and could be 

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, 

As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed 

Scarce seemed a vision ; I would ne'er have striven 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 
Oh ! lift me as a wa^x, a leaf, a cloud ! 
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! 

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 
One too like thee : tameless, and swift, and proud. 

V. 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : 
What if my leaves are falling like its own! 
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, 
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! 
And, by the incantation of this verse, 

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind ! 
Be through my lips to unawakened earth 

The trumpet of a prophecy ! O wind, 

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 

1819. 



NOTES. 



Note i. p. i. 
The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is placed first in this book, 
not only because it pictures Shelley's earliest aspirations, but 
also because Shelley has not added in this hymn, as he has 
done in other poems, any " mortal image " to his expression 
of the Platonic doctrine of the love of the Idea of Beauty. To 
understand the poem the reader ought to refer to that passage 
in Shelley's translation of the "Symposium" of Plato which 
begins — Diotima is represented as speaking: — "Your own 
meditation, Socrates, might perhaps have initiated you in all 
these things which I have already taught you on the subject 
of Love," and continue to the close of the speech of Diotima. 
See Essays, vol. i. pp. 1 18-122. 

Note ii. p. 6. 

" Shelley . . . was at a loss for a title, and I proposed that 
which he adopted — Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. The 
Greek word, iAao-rwp, is an evil genius, Ka/co6ai>w»', . . . The 
poem treated the spirit of sohtude as a spirit of evil." This 
statement of Mr. Peacock's is supported not only by the poem, 
but also by the Preface, especially by the words — " The poet's 
self-centred seclusion was avenged by the Furies of an irre- 
sistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin." See also the 
lines — 

" The spirit of sweet human love has sent 

A vision to the sleep of him who spurned 

Her choicest giftsy 

317 



3i8 NOTES. 

Note iii. p. 12. 
" Her voice was like the voice of his own soul 
Heard in the calm of thought." 
The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty represents the pure Platonic 
conception of Love, and of that which it loves. In Alastor, in 
Prince Athanase, in many of the lyrics, Shelley retreats from 
this conception, and amalgamating two thoughts in the " Sym- 
posium," invents a conception of his own. In that dialogue 
Aristophanes tells an amusing myth of the original human- 
being divided into man and woman, and of each part of this 
man-woman ever afterwards passionately seeking the other. 
The serious element in this is, " that the loves of this world 
are an indistinct anticipation of an ideal union which is not 
yet realized," or perhaps that each human being has its com- 
plement, and strives to find it. That is one element in 
Shelley's conception. The other is taken from the represen- 
tation made by Diotima of the lover of absolute Beauty seeking 
for its image in mortal forms, and his loving of these images 
when found, as one of the steps whereby he ascends to the 
love of ideal Beauty. Throwing these two together, Shelley 
forms a new conception. He conceives of the archetj'pal 
Beauty, that Beauty which is the model and source of all other 
beauty, as embodied somewhere beyond this material world 
in the other half of his own soul. In visions he sees this 
Being, and pursues her incessantly, but is always driven by a 
weakness in his nature to try and find her image in real 
women. His ideal love continually glides back into a desire 
of realizing itself on earth. He is thus, as he calls himself 
in Adonais, a "power girt round with weakness." Alastor 
records the coming of the Vision, and the agony of not finding 
it realized. Unable to be content with the love of Ideal Beauty 
alone, unable to find it realized to the sense on earth, the poet, 
beaten between and tortured by these two inabilities, dies of 
the pain. Epipsychidion records a moment when he thought 
that he had found realized in Emiha this " soul out of his 
soul." Had Prince Athanase been finished, it would have 
recorded the vicissitudes of this pursuit. 



NOTES. 319 

The personal element in Love, which is only a step towards 
the higher Love in Plato, is a distinct part of it in Shelley. 
And it was his profound feeling of the necessity of this for him 
that made him create, as part of his idea of Love, an ideal 
image of his own soul, a heightened, externalized personality 
of himself, whom he felt in Knowledge, in Woman, and in 
Nature, and to absolute union with whom, such union as is 
described in the latter part of Epipsychidlon, he passionately 
aspired. But it is best to refer to Shelley himself for this in- 
vention, for this addition to the Platonic theory of Love. He 
expresses it fully enough in his Essay on Love. See the sen- 
tences beginning " Thou demandest — What is Love? " They 
illustrate passage after passage in Alastor and in the other 
poems. See, also, verses 3, 4, and 5 of the poem of The 
Zucca. 

Note iv. pp. 18, 19. 

There can be no reason for these unearthly and unnatural 
scenes, except the wish to illustrate a temper of mind as un- 
earthly and unnatural. They are the image of a mind tossed 
by the waves of impossible desire, and so maddened that only 
the quiet of death can follow. And so it is. The gentle 
stream follows, and the profound forest, and the ideal land- 
scape, evening and death. 

Note v. p. 25, 

" On every side now rose 
Rocks which, in unimaginable forms. 
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles 
In the light of evening, and its precipice 
Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above 
'Mid toppling stones." 

I cannot but think that the easiest explanation of this dis- 
puted passage is to read the for its. The precipice is men- 
tioned afterwards in two or three passages, but in these 
passages it is spoken of as it is seen on the other side of the 
valley, beyond the gap, where it falls downwards to the plain. 



320 NOTES. 

What the poet sees now are, first, the sides of the valley rising 
with pinnacles of rock ; and, secondly, in front 'of him, the 
towering sides sweeping round and closing up the valley in a 
precipitous curve, which, because it is between him and the 
descending sun, obscures the ravine where he is walking. This 
precipice, which shuts in the valley in front of him, opens its 
stony jaws ("the abrupt mountain breaks"), is disclosed, at 
first above, and afterwards below, as he walks on. He then 
sees the gate of the hills, and passing through it by the side 
of the stream, among the toppling stones, beholds the mighty 
landscape far below, in the light of evening and of the 
descending moon. But I am inclined to think that its is 
right. lis may either be carelessly used, as if he had men- 
tioned the mountain, when he has only mentioned rocks, or, 
by one of those tortuous constructions, not uncommon in 
Shelley, its stands for its own — its own precipice obscuring 
the ravine. 

Note vi. p. 25. 

This wonderful description of a vast landscape is one of the 
many instances in Shelley of Nature presenting herself to him 
as she presented herself to the landscape-painter Turner. 



Note vii. p. 28, last line. 

The application of the adjectives has been discussed. But 
it seems plain enough. It is quite in Shelley's manner, as 
in the " Ode to the West Wind," in " When the lamp is 
shattered," and in many other poems, to go back to and 
bring together his illustrations. Here the poet's frame is a 
lute, a bright stream, a dream of youth. The lute is still, the 
stream is dark and dry, the dream is un remembered. 



Note viii. pp. 31, 33. 

These two poems are inserted here from their striking the 
same note as the last scene in Alastor. 



NOTES. 321 

Note ix. p. 40. 

This is part of the introduction of Hellas. The first and 
third verses are sung by a chorus of Greek captive women 
while Mahmud is sleeping, the second and fourth verses by 
fne Indian slave who sits beside his couch. 

Note x. pp. 42, 43. 
This is a splendid example of that highly wrought painting 
of cloud and sky in which Shelley stands almost alone among 
English poets. There are fine examples in Wordsworth and 
Byron, but they have neither the detail, nor the splendor, nor 
the subtilty of color that Shelley puts into his skies. This 
might be a description of one of Turner's storm skies. The 
long trains of tremulous mist that precede the tempest, the cleft 
in the storm-clouds, and seen through it, high above, the space 
of blue sky, fretted with fair clouds, the pallid semicircle of the 
moon with mist on its upper horn, the flying rack of clouds 
below the serene spot — all are as Turner saw them; but 
painting cannot give what Shelley gives — the growth and 
progress of the changes of the storm. 

Note xi. p. 48. 
I have only inserted the Mask, and left out its explanation. 
That explanation, in its two parts, has seemed to me to trouble, 
as all explanations do, and especially an artist's, the work 
of art. 

Note xii. p. 2>:^. 

This is another of those pictured skies in which Shelley 
excels. They are almost the only aspects of Nature which 
he sees with absolute clearness, and describes with absolute 
directness. This could be painted from, but then only Turner 
could have painted it, or would have cared to paint it. 

Note xiii. p. 93. 
" The inmost purple spirit of light, and made 
Their peaks transparent." 



32 2 NOTES. 

Nothing can be more accurate. In certain states of atmos- 
phere, when the sun sinks over those hills in autumn, they 
change as it were into violet vapor, and seem no less trans- 
parent to the eye. 

In this poem, Julian and Maddalo, Shelley employs, he 
says, a certain familiar style of language. It is not gracefully 
or easily employed, nor is the language familiar. In the nar- 
rative parts it actually resembles the style of Shelley's novels 
Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and is prosaic beyond anything in 
Wordsworth. 

" My dear friend. 

Said Maddalo, my judgment will not bend 

To your opinion, though I think you might 

Make such a system refutation-tight 

As far as words go." 

That is prose, and bad prose, and it does not stand alone. 

In the descriptive parts, the poem is, of course, not familiar, 
but highly imaginative. In the tale of the Madman, its pas- 
sion lifts it wholly out of the familiar. Excellent indeed as 
Julian and Maddalo is, its note is peculiar and unequal, nor 
are its elements kindly mixed. And this partly arises from 
Shelley having put so much of himself into the Madman, 
that the character is not separated from his own, that is, from 
Julian's, with sufficient sharpness. Julian and the Madman 
grow into one another as we read. 

Note xiv. p. in. 

It is interesting to compare with Mont Blanc, Letter iv. to 
Peacock. It contains the germ of many of the images used, 
and of the thoughts expressed in the poem. 

Note xv. p. 119. 

I saw once, from a tower that overlooked two rookeries, this 
very thing. The moment the sun's disk had fully climbed 
over the edge of a distant wood, the whole band of rooks, 
from both their homes, silent before, rose, all the birds to- 



NOTES. 323 

gether, with a great " hail " into the air, and hovering together 
for a second or two, streamed down the wind towards the 
sun. 

Note xvi. p. 132. 
I have put in this extract from Rosalind and Helen, that its 
feebler work may be compared with Shelley's treatment of 
the same subject, under the influence of passion, in the 
Recollection. 

Note xvii. p. 134. 
This is the same subject as The Zucca of the poems. In 
this form it occurs in an unfinished drama, and is more in 
the special manner of Shelley than is the poem itself. The 
subject, thus twice treated, and alluded to also in the Witch of 
Atlas (p. 210, Hne 5), grew out of a real incident which is 
described in one of the Shelley letters. 

Note xviii. p. 146, lines 15, 16. 
This is the second time that Shelley borrows this phrase 
from Wordsworth ; from the Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a 
picture of Peele Castle. 

"Whene'er I looked, thy image still was there; 
It trembled, but it never passed away." 

Note xix, p. 148. 

The poems of the preceding section I have called Poems of 
Nature and Man, because in them, as in some others else- 
where placed in this book, Shelley has mixed up Nature with 
human feeling, chiefly with his own feeling. In some of these 
poems, which I have called Poe7ns of pure Nature, he writes 
of Nature as his special form of Pantheism, if I may call it 
that, urged him. He writes of her apart from Man, as the 
outward image of an all-sustaining, all-pervading Love, whom 
he embodied in the creation of Asia. Nay, he sometimes 
writes of this Love alone, and seems to forget that there is 
any image of her in the outward world. She is when he con- 



324 NOTES. 

ceives her best, alive, and has her own separate pleasures and 
pains. And below her, and deriving life from her, is Panthea, 
the whole of the phenomenal universe. But he writes also in 
these poems of certain distinct individualities in Nature, with- 
out any reference to a spiritual life in which they are contained. 
The Cloud, the Apennine, the sphere of vapor sucked by the 
sun from the forest pool, the Moon, the Earth, have each and 
all their own distinct life, their own living spirit ; be, and have, 
and do of their own will. 

Note xx. p. 155. 

I have left out the last verse of this song to Asia, because it 
is mixed up with the events of the Drama. The song is, in 
this book, the better without it. If Asia is the embodiment of 
that Love by which the universe is, and who, in loving, makes 
the universe, this song seems to conceive that there is a some- 
thing behind and greater than this Love ; a central source of 
Being and Power — the Demogorgon of the Prometheus Un- 
bound. Yet to call Demogorgon the central source of being, 
would say more, perhaps, than Shelley meant. If he had 
been asked himself what he meant, he might have replied, I 
conceive of a vast Perception, and no more. Nevertheless, 
the Thought and the Song may be compared with Goethe's 
conception of the Mothers in the second part of Faust, and of 
Faust's descent to find them. 

Note xxi, pp. 158, 164, 
The last stanza is omitted of the Echo Song. 
At page 164 the answer of the Earth to the first stanza of the 
Moon's song to him is omitted, and also the long series of 
stanzas which follow the Earth's, " It interpenetrates my 
granite mass," partly because they are mixed up with the 
ethical end of the Drama, partly because they are, if one may 
dare to say so, less good than the rest. 

I have changed the common punctuation at the end of the 
line, " Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst," 
because it seems plain that Shelley meant the Moon to take up 



NOTES, 325 

the answering song, and to carry out herself that which the 
Earth was about to say. In the same way the Earth takes up 
and finishes for the Moon what she was about to say after the 

" When the sunset sleeps 
Upon its snow " — 

so that each toss to and fro their thoughts of each other. The 
concluding lines which follow the verse, " Through isles for 
ever calm," seem to me to spoil, by their fierceness of note, 
those that precede them. I have, therefore, as one may in 
selections, been bold enough to leave them out. 

Note xxii. p. 181. 
These few poems which are apart from those on Nature, and 
on Man, and on Shelley's phases of passion outside his home, 
are called Poe??is of Home Life, for want of a better title. At 
page 196, though the Eton remembrances are interesting, the 
new matter lately discovered is not inserted. 

Note xxiii. p. 201. 

Whom or what Shelley meant by his Witch of Atlas is 
scarcely worth asking. She keeps her own secret. But I 
have sometimes thought that its germ may be found in the 
line in Mont Blanc — 

" In the still cave of the Witch, Poesy; " 

and her birth from Apollo, and the beasts that come to her as 
to Orpheus' song, and many other things, fit that Witch. 

Note xxiv, p. 227. 

Shelley translates his title in the line — 

" Whither 'twas fled this soul out of my soul; " 

and the word Epipsychidion is coined by him to express the 
idea of that line. It might mean " something which is placed 
on a soul," as if to complete or crown it. Or it might be, and 
more probably was, intended by Shelley to be a diminutive of 



326 NOTES. 

endearment, from Epipsyche. There is no such Greek word 
as 67Ti-i//vx>?. But Epipsyche would mean "a soul upon a 
soul," just as Epicycle, in the Ptolemaic astronomy, meant " a 
circle upon a circle." Such a " soul on a soul " might be 
paraphrased as " a soul which is the complement of, or re- 
sponsive to, another soul," i.e., to the soul of the poet, so that 
each soul seeks to be united with that other to be in harmony 
wherewith it has been created. This idea, many suggestions 
of which may be found in Plato, seems most clearly expressed 
in the lines near the end of the poem beginning — 

" One passion in two hearts." 

As in the Vita Nuova, Dante writes sometimes of Beatrice 
herself, and sometimes of the absolute Love and Wisdom 
whom she represents, and at other times seems to write of both 
together, as if the earthly and the heavenly passion were 
wrought into one, so here Shelley (pp. 229-33) speaks now 
of Emilia alone, and now of that Epipsychidion whom he feels 
through her, and who is veiled in her. The phrases change 
from being personal and passionate to being impersonal and 
passionate. The image and the thing imaged are frequently 
fused into one. Yet in the end, he ascends through Emilia 
to the " Divinity of the world of his own thoughts." Who 
that was he describes — " There was a Being whom my spirit 
oft." It is the Spirit of the Hymn to httellectual Beauty. 
" Her spirit was the harmony of truth." Then he describes the 
search for her, repeating the motive and the story of Alastor. 
In the midst of this we come on that thought, not contained 
in Alastor, which is found in the notes to Prince Athanase. 
He meets " one whose voice is venomed melody." This is 
the image of sensual Love of Beauty — Aphrodite Pandemos 
— and the description of this lower love may be compared with 
that dwelt on in Shakspere's later sonnets to which Shelley, 
afterwards speaking of this poem, refers. • 

Shelley now turns away from his youthful experience in 
Alastor to speak of how he sought to find in mortal women 
the shadow of that celestial substance of his Epipsychidion. 



NOTES. 327 

The one " who was true (p. 233), but not true to him," is Har- 
riet Grove. I conjecture that the " comet, beautiful and 
fierce," is that woman of whose love for Shelley we have so 
many hints, and who swept, as it were like a comet, across the 
orbit of his life in London, Switzerland, and Naples. Mary 
Godwin is the Moon of the passage. I imagine that the lines 
which tell of her only speak of the first years of his union with 
her, and that the " storms which then lashed the ocean of his 
sleep " image the troubled feelings which we find in the lines 
written to her in 1814, and the misery he fa-It on hearing of his 
wife's death. In that case, " She, the Planet of that hour," 
who was " quenched," and who is not represented as in any 
way one of the images of his ideal soul, would be the only 
allusion to Harriet Westbrook, and one sufficiently obscure 
not to be unbecoming. The strange thing is that, under the 
symbolism of the text, Mary Godwin — and here the later 
experience of his married life enters the poem — is certainly 
represented as not having sufficiently kindled or warmed his 
life. When the earthquakes broke up the " death of ice," she, 
the white Moon, smiled all the while, ignorant as she was at 
Naples of the passion that then, as is thought, made him de- 
jected. There are other passages in his poems that support 
the view that though he was happy in his marriage he was 
not contented. Then Emilia is described, " Soft as an Incar- 
nation of the Sun," in whom at last he finds life. For a short 
space Shelley mingles together Sun and Moon, bright regents 
of his life, in alternate sway, and then the Moon and Mary 
disappear. The rest of the Poem, though it seems especially 
personal, is not intended to be so. He slips again and again 
into phrases of personal passion, because of his " error of seek- 
ing in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal," 
but he is always striving, in intention, to speak only of the 
vision of his youth, of her who is his second soul, the spiritual 
substance of all his ideals, of all the Knowledge and Love and 
Beauty and Nature which he perceives. Of this Emilia is only 
the shadow. And the Ionian Isle and all else are meant to be 
impalpable ; images of an immaterial world. He says that no 



328 NOTES. 

keel has ever ploughed the sea-path to the island. It is itself 
cradled 'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, and is never visited 
by the scourges that afflict the earth. The passionate descrip- 
tion of his life there with Emilia is the description of Shelley 
at last united to that other far-off half of his being, and the 
incorporation of the two into one is as ideal as the rest. It is 
love reaching its perfect aim, but it has clasped its reality so 
wholly in the immaterial world of pure thought, that he, with 
that weakness, as he thought it, which unfitted him for contin- 
uance in this etherial region, cannot live in it save for a mo- 
ment. Earth claims him again. 

"Woe is me! 

The winged words on which my soul would pierce 

Into the heights of love's rare Universe 

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire — 

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire 1 " 

(Compare some lines in the last verse of the Ode to the 
West Wind.) 

The fault of the poem as an exposition of the Platonic the- 
ory of Love, even with Shelley's addition thereto, is perhaps 
the very root of its excellence as poetry. It is mixed, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, with some love for the woman 
herself, and this love rising through the intellectual imagery 
and setting it on fire, redeems it from the cold abstractness 
of the philosophy, and makes it passionate poetry. Yet the 
passion for Emilia was truly an ideal one. Shelley himself 
compared it, when it had died in another and less ideal love, 
to the love of Ixion for the cloud, and he could not look with 
much pleasure on this poem, its offspring. He had not then 
enough of love to absorb or to give substance to his ideal 
philosophy. Of this idealism of love Epipsychidion was the 
last result. He expressed it all in that poem, and finished 
with it. Whatever love came afterwards was real, for a woman 
herself, not for her as the shadow of a spiritual substance. 
" It is a part of me," said Shelley, speaking of this poem, 
" which is already dead." There is not a trace of this philoso- 



NOTES. 329 

phy of Love in the poems written to Mrs. Williams. It is 
true that the verses, 3, 4, 5, I have already alluded to, in The 
Zucca (1822) of the Poems, were written after Epipsychidion, 
and describe, more clearly than elsewhere, his imagined love. 
But they are verses that look back to what has been rather 
than on what is. At their beginning, the past tense, / loved, 
is used, and even when the present tense is used, the things 
said have the note of the past. 

The main motive of the poem is again taken up with dif- 
ferent coloring and imagery in the fable, Una Favola, which 
has been published by Mr. Garnet in his Relics of Shelley. 
That Fable is dated 1820, but I should conjecture from its 
peculiar note, and from its being written in Italian, that it was 
composed after his meeting with Emilia Viviani. At any rate 
many of its images and expressions are repeated in Epi- 
psychidion. The cave where death and life are, and their flight, 
the obscure forest into which Emilia comes, are both in the 
Fable, and many other things. So, also, he who cares for 
Epipsychidion would do well to read the first canzone of 
Dante's Convito, the last stanza of which is translated by 
Shelley as an introduction to this poem. 

Note xxv. p. 249. 

" The author has connected many recollections of his visit 
to Pompeii and Baiae, with the enthusiasm exerted by the 
proclamation of a constitutional Government at Naples. This 
has given a tinge of picturesque and descriptive imagery to 
the introductory Epodes, which depicture the scenes, and 
some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the 
scene of this animating event. 

" ' The viper's palsying- venoin.' The viper was the armorial 
device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan." — Shelley's Note. 

Note xxvi. p. 252. 
I have printed this, as also " Life may change, but it may 
fly not," at p. 261, without the divisions made by the alter- 
nating semichorus. 



33^ NOTES, 

Note xxvii. p, 260. 
This is the close of Prometheus Unbound. It has been 
included in this book, not for the sake of its poetical quality, 
which is inferior to other passages in the Drama which might 
have been inserted, but for its importance as a declaration, 
not only of what Shelley thought Man would become, but also 
of how he thought Man should act now in order to arrive at 
the Golden Age. The two last verses embody the main 
motives of the Revolt of Islam. 

Note xxviii. p. 262. 
The Sensitive Plant is inserted in this place as an intro- 
duction to the love poems which belong to Mrs. Williams, 
because Shelley said that Mrs. Williams was the exact antitype 
of the lady depicted in it. The Sensitive Plant is, of course, 
Shelley himself, " companionless," as he makes himself in 
Adonais, " desiring what it has not, the beautiful." 

Note xxix. p. 278. 
" Wild wind, when sullen cloud 
Knells all the night long." 

We may compare in order to explain the term — 

" As the last cloud of an expiring storm 
Whose thunder is its knell." (Adonais.) 

" Bare woods, whose branches stain " must be strain, as 
many have conjectured. All the things spoken of are sound- 
ing. The wind moans, the cloud knells, the caves and sea 
wail, and there are few sounds so in tune with the tempest of 
this poem as the groaning of branches straining in a storm. 

Note xxx. p. 284. 
I have left out the lines which, however interesting per- 
sonally, are out of harmony with the rest of the poem. 



NOTES. 11 



Note xxxi. p. 286. 

The four lines omitted by Shelley in the Recollection deserve 
insertion here. 

" Were not the crocuses that grew 
Under the ilex tree 
As beautiful in scent and hue 
As ever fed the bee ? " 



Note xxxii. p. 293. 
The Greek motto is translated elsewhere by Shelley. 

" Thou wert the morning star among the living, 
Ere thy fair light had fled ; 
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving 
New splendor to the dead." 

Note xxxiii. pp. 305, 306, 

The Pilgrim of Eternity is Byron. lerne is Ireland, and 
her lyrist, Moore. 

No analysis of Shelley's nature can excel or equal the self- 
description of the three verses of p. 306. Leigh Hunt is the 
last of the mountain shepherds alluded to, p. 307. 

The lines — 

"And his own thoughts, along that rugged way 
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey." 

are Shelley's reminiscence of two lines in a poem of Words- 
worth's. 

" And his own mind did like a tempest strong 
Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along." 

It is interesting to compare them. They speak volumes of 
both poets. 



33^ NOTES. 

Note xxxiv. p. 311. 

" And flowery weeds and fragrant copses dress 
The bones of Desolation's nakedness." 
Nothing but the bones are there now ; and what have we 
gained ? 

Note xxxv. p. 314. 

" This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood 
that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that 
tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and 
animating, was collecting the vapors which pour down the 
autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a 
violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent 
thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cis-alpine regions. 

" The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third 
stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the 
bottom of the sea, of rivers and of lakes, sympathizes with that 
of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently 
influenced by the winds that announce it." — Shelley's Note. 

It is characteristic of Shelley's pleasure in repeating an 
image or a thought that pleased him, that he makes use of 
this " phenomenon " at least three times in different poems. 

Note xxxvi. p. 293. 
The lines from Moschus with which Shelley prefaced the 
Adonais were accidentally omitted in the text. I insert them 
here, with a translation made of them by Professor Mahaffy. 

^apfx-aKOV ri\de Bi'iov ttotI crov crroixa ^apfiaKoei,8d<;. 
TTois rev toI? )(^ei\ea<TL noriSpafJie k'ovk eyKvKdvdrj; 
Ti? 6e jSpoTOS, ToaaovToi' ai/d/Aepo? cos Kepdaai toi 
r) Sovvat \a\eovTi to ^6.pft.aKOV , ov ^'uyev (JSac; 

Bion, a potion came to thy mouth which soothed like a potion. 
How did it touch thy lips and not change its bitter to sweetness? 
Who so savage of men as to mix or to give thee the poison 
Even as thou didst speak ? Fled he not from the voice of thy 
singing? 



INDEX OF FIRST LINES. 



PAGE 

A glorious people vibrated again 56 

Alas! Italian winds are mild 133 

Amid the desolation of a city 144 

And like a dying lady, lean and pale 146 

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dyin^ king • • • • 55 

Arethusa arose 173 

Ariel to Miranda. — Take 281 

Art thou pale for weariness ........ 129 

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew ...... 262 

As I lay asleep in Italy 48 

At the creation of the Earth 173 

A widow bird sate mourning for her love ..... 82 

A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune .... 141 

Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth .... 197 

Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist ..... 116 

Best and brightest, come away! 284 

Brother mine, calm wanderer ....... 162 

Daylight on its last purple cloud 141 

" Do you not hear the Aziola cry? ...... 190 

Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood ..... 7 

Echoes we: listen! 156 

Even whilst we speak . .157 

False friend, wilt thou smile or weep 40 

From the forests and highlands . . . . . . . 171 

Hail to thee, blithe spirit ! 137 

Her voice did quiver as we parted . • 85 

How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten 195 

333 



334 INDEX OF FIRST IINES. 

PAGB 

I arise from dreams of thee 79 

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers . . . •147 

I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way 220 

I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden 80 

If I walk in Autumn's even 75 

I loved — alas ! our life is love 80 

I loved, I love, and when I love no more 81 

I met a traveller from an antique land 67 

In silence then they took the way 132 

In the great morning of the world 252 

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo 90 

I saw two little dark-green leaves 134 

Is it that in some brighter sphere 244 

I stood within the city disinterred 245 

It was a bright and cheerful afternoon 71 

It was the azure time of June 70 

I weep for Adonais — he is dead ! 295 

Let there be light ! said Liberty ....... 252 

Life may change, but it may fly not 261 

Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle 154 

Lift not the painted veil which those who live .... 38 

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead 75 

Listen, listen, Mary mine 147 

Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me 222 

Many a green isle needs must be 117 

Men of England, wherefore plough 54 

Music, when soft voices die 292 

My coursers are fed with the lightning 151 

My faint spirit was sitting in the light 78 

My lost William, thou in whom 178 

My song, I fear that thou wilt find but few 223 

Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame 56 

Now the last day of many days 286 

Oh, world! oh, life! oh, time! 278 

Old winter was gone 39 

O Mary dear, that you were here 17S 

On a poet's lips I slept 5 

One word is too often profaned 279 



INDEX OF FIRST LINES, 335 

PAGE 

Orphan hours, the year is dead 7^ 

O thou, who plumed with strong desire 32 

Our boat is asleep on Serchio's stream ...... 191 

O, wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being . . . 314 

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know 42 

Rarely, rarely, comest thou 276 

Rough wind, that moanest loud 278 

Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth 176 

She left me at the silent time 290 

She saw me not — she heard me not — alone .... 83 

Sweet Spirit ! Sister of that orphan one 224 

Swifter far than summer's flight 289 

Swiftly walk over the western wave 87 

Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light 129 

That time is dead for ever, child /^. 76 

The awful shadow of some unseen Power i 

The babe is at peace within the womb 38 

The blasts of Autumn drive the winged seeds . . . .68 

The cold earth slept below 34 

The everlasting universe of things m 

The flower that smiles to-day 73 

The fountains mingle with the river 78 

The golden gates of Sleep unbar 88 

The pale stars are gone ! 150 

The path thro' which that lovely twain 166 

The rude wind is singing 38 

The season was the childhood of sweet June .... 85 

The serpent is shut out from paradise 274 

The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie 170 

The spider spreads her webs, whether she be ... . 180 

The sun is set; the swallows are asleep 145 

The sun is warm, the sky is clear 130 

The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing ... 71 

The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere .... 36 

The world's great age begins anew 256 

The young moon has fed 151 

Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all .... 152 



336 INDEX OF FIRST LINES. 

PAGE 

Thou, Earth, calm empire of a happy soul 257 

Thy little footsteps on the sands . . • , . . '179 

To the deep, to the deep 153 

'Twas at the season when the Earth upsprings .... 69 

Unfathomable Sea ! whose waves are years 67 

[We] look on that which cannot change — the One ... 4 

We strew these opiate flowers 40 

When passion's trance is overpast 280 

When soft winds and sunny skies 146 

When the lamp is shattered 279 

When the last hope of trampled France had failed ... 42 

Where art thou, beloved To-morrow? ...... 74 

Wilt thou forget the happy hours 75 

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever 254 

Ye gentle visitations of calm thought ...... 131 

Ye hasten to the dead ! What seek ye there .... 37 











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